Of Friends, Gods, and Monsters
by Marg Hammerman
Summary: Kurt and Logan have a falling out, and Kurt begins to doubt his role on the team. The intervention of Kurt's closest friends—not to mention the love of a good woman—begins the healing. But nothing lasts forever. Kurt/Ororo, Kurt/Rachel, mild Kurt/Logan.
1. Omelettes and Old Friends

This is set during the XSE-era (Uncanny X-Men 444-onwards to the aftermath of Second Coming). Tries to follow comics continuity, but since comics continuity never makes total sense, hopefully you'll allow me a few divergences (such as Rachel's presence in the Epilogue) and the decisions I've made regarding the passage of time between events. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I don't own the X-Men. If I did I'd probably be making them kiss each other on national tv rather than concocting fanfiction about them

Chapter 1: Omelettes and Old Friends

When Kurt Wagner entered the kitchen, Logan was sipping a mug of black coffee and leafing through yesterday's newspaper—being 5 am, it was still too early for a new one.

"Coffee?"

"Do you need to ask, my friend?"

Kurt's fangs flashed in an expansive yawn, his lean, tight muscles shifting fluidly under his fine indigo fur as he stretched his body all the way down to the tip of his forked tail and rubbed his blinking, glowing golden eyes with his two-fingered hands. While Kurt's appearance was unique enough to have caused more than one angry mob to want him dead, none of the fangs, the fur, the tail, the two-toed hands and feet, the glowing eyes or the pointed ears had ever bothered Logan. Long years ago, when he'd first been introduced to the demonic-looking acrobat from Germany who would later become his best friend, Logan had quickly realized that Kurt's body suited him because of the way he handled it, everything offset by its opposite. His fangs were most often seen within a warm, expansive grin, just as his eyes generally sparkled more than burned. Though the weight of his tail often caused him to stoop or crouch, he was also breathtakingly graceful; when he wasn't fighting or performing impossible acrobatic feats, he walked upright in a kind of dancerly, sauntering gait, rolling on the balls of his unique feet, body flowing smoothly before the serpentine curves of his seldom-still tail. Especially now, dressed in such an innocuous ensemble of striped pyjama pants and a white t-shirt, Kurt just seemed… like Kurt. Despite the outrageous combination of physical characteristics that might have made him a monster, to Logan, and to everyone else who loved him, Kurt just seemed like Kurt.

At that moment, though, Kurt's golden eyes were cloudy with morning haze, his tail practically dragging on the floor behind him. Still, he was graceful enough to seem weightless as he hopped up on the bar stool next to Logan.

"You ready for this?" Logan asked as he poured the coffee.

"Lord in heaven, yes."

"Not the coffee, elf, the mission."

"I will be," Kurt yawned, shaking a two-fingered hand through the unkempt morning tangle of his wavy, blue-black hair. "I just… haven't been sleeping well."

"Anything the matter?"

"No, no. Nothing important. But how are _you_?" Kurt regarded Logan earnestly over the lip of his coffee mug, the haze seeming to melt from his eyes as concern took over from tiredness. It was to be Kurt and Logan's first mission together since Logan had been returned to the X-Men following a very bloody stint as a brainwashed assassin of the Hand.

"I'm okay, elf. Thanks for asking."

"Do you… want to talk about it?"

"Not right now."

Seeing that Kurt looked almost hurt by his bluntness, Logan added, "But I'll let you know when I do."

Kurt smiled weakly. "I will be here."

"Gentlemen."

Ororo Munroe customarily attracted all eyes as she entered a room. Though she wore an old cloth bathrobe and had tucked her dazzling silver-white hair away beneath a black headscarf, today was no exception. Ororo had a way about her, a beauty, but also a majesty, that transcended clothes or surroundings; even disregarding her awesome power, Logan knew it was no wonder she'd once been mistaken for a goddess.

"'Ro," Logan greeted her. "Coffee?"

"No, thank you. But I would like some breakfast. Who's cooking?"

Kurt and Ororo both looked at Logan.

"What the—What did the two of you do for breakfast the whole time I was gone?"

"Logan, please," Kurt admonished. "I would never betray your omelettes by eating anyone else's."

"Not me," smiled Ororo. "I simply had Hank take up the task. But he is away at the moment. You're not. And I'm hungry."

Propelled by Logan's famous omelettes, breakfast proceeded along companionable lines that made all three of them embrace a feeling of travelling back into what always seemed like the more carefree past—when the enemy could be easily identified by a colourful costume and saving the world sometimes seemed like a tangible goal.

"You'd better suit up," Ororo said at last. "The jet will be waiting for you in the hanger at 6."

"You got it, boss," said Logan, handing off his plate to Kurt who took it over to the dishwasher. "Any last minute instructions?"

She shook her head. "Everything we know was in the briefing. Just… Be careful."

"Always am, darlin'."

Ororo was standing very close to Logan when he stood up. She reached up and squeezed his shoulder with her hand. "I know. All the same."

Her hand slid down his arm to his hand as she leaned in to kiss him, close mouthed, at the corner of his lips.

"I am very glad you're back," she said.

Logan could feel Kurt's golden eyes locked on his back, just as he could smell him giving off the faint but familiar scent of heightened emotions: tension, adrenaline. It was a song and dance that had been going on for months, since well before Logan was enslaved by the Hand. During that time, Logan and Ororo had gone on several dates, technically as friends although many of the nights had ended in kissing that was frequently on the brink of turning into something more. For his part, Logan held back for a number of sakes, including his long friendship with Ororo. But he also held back for the sake of his other friend, his best friend, whose scent and body language in quiet moments with and near Ororo barely required enhanced senses to interpret. Especially, though, Logan held back because he knew Ororo's scent also changed when she got close to Kurt.

Logan stepped back from Ororo as he felt Kurt approach them.

"Hanger?" Kurt asked. "15 minutes?"

Logan nodded. "See you there."


	2. Flying and Talking

Chapter 2: Flying and Talking

Twenty-five minutes later, Kurt and Logan were in the air en route to Mississauga, Ontario, a suburban extension of Canada's largest city, Toronto. For nearly 48 hours now, a terrorist group known as the Humanity Brigade had been holed up in an abandoned office building with a group of between 20 and 30 hostages from a local community shelter known for its outreach programs for mutants. Among the groups' obviously outlandish demands were the immediate institution of a Canadian mutant registration act and sanctions against Canadian mutants' reproductive rights. If the Humanity Brigade didn't receive confirmation of those political reforms from the Prime Minister by noon that day, they had promised to start killing their hostages.

Local law enforcement had been reluctant to breach the position given the difficult territory and the large number of hostages. Yet it was 24 hours before they decided to reach out to the American government for help contacting the X.S.E., and another 6 hours after that before the government finally called Storm. A dawn assault had been decided late the night before. It was unconfirmed whether any of the hostages were dangerous mutants, though the possibility was slim that any of them were mutants at all; while the shelter did reach out to mutants, the vast majority of its aid recipients were still merely human. In reality, the situation was a bit outside the X.S.E.'s mandate. Ororo, though, knew a good public relations opportunity when she saw one, and, anxious to establish the X.S.E.'s international credibility so close to home, she had offered the services of senior agents Nighcrawler and Wolverine to resolve the situation.

Given that they would be relying on his teleportation powers to navigate the abandoned building the terrorists were using as their base, Kurt was in charge of the operation. They didn't anticipate any problems—a couple of dozen fifth-rate terrorists against two of the most seasoned X-Men wasn't expected to be much of a contest. The plan was non-lethal submission and, more importantly, zero casualties among civilians or hostages. Kurt and Logan were to land the Blackbird at a private strip at the Mississauga airport where they would be escorted the rest of the way by local authorities. Via Kurt, they would create their own surprise insertion point once they reached the target.

It was a short flight from New York, just half an hour in the Blackbird. Kurt and Logan spent the first ten minutes reviewing the details of the mission before settling into their own particular brand of catching up.

"So you're not sleeping, huh?" asked Logan.

"I'm sleeping," said Kurt. "I'm just not sleeping _well_."

"Bad dreams?"

"No, nothing like that. I don't know. I'm just not feeling very optimistic these days, I suppose."

"That's not like you."

"Isn't it? I don't know anymore…"

"Cry me a river, elf. At least you're not still trying to lay everything at the Lord's feet and forsaking the company of the fairer sex."

"I might have given up the priesthood, but I still believe in God," Kurt reminded him.

Logan shrugged. "Makes _me_ sleep easier, anyway, seein' you less guilt-ridden."

"_Guilt-ridden_?" Kurt echoed, not quite incredulous. It was far from the first time he and Logan had argued about religion. "That's really how you think about my faith?"

"That's how I think of you spending a year and a half being celibate. You weren't sleeping too well then _either_, as I recall."

Kurt tried to meet Logan's gaze but his friend's eyes seemed lost in the clouds beyond the windshield. Logan was projecting an air of almost deliberate casualness, leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, working a toothpick back and forth between his lips.

"No," Kurt admitted, not a little hesitatingly, suspicious of Logan's motives. "I guess not."

"'You guess not,'" Logan smirked. "How long after you left the priesthood before you called Amanda?"

"Logan, please."

They both stared forward at the deep grey dappled clouds.

"Four days."

"And?"

"And _what_?"

"Year and a half's a long time…"

"What is that supposed to—"

"Just sayin'."

Kurt looked very busy for a moment examining some readings on the control panel.

"We didn't leave the bed for two days except to teleport to the kitchen for food."

"Ha!" Logan slapped him on the back.

Kurt grinned, succumbing to Logan's mirth. "She is a remarkable woman."

"But you never make it work."

Kurt's smile faded, eyes dropping once more to the controls. "Ach, it's complicated."

"Sure."

"No, I mean, _complicated_."

"Un-huh."

"We're both very _busy_."

"'Course."

Kurt looked at him. "You are driving at something. What?"

"Did I ask a question?"

"No…" Kurt faltered. "No, I guess not."

Kurt surveyed the clouds, the controls, his own white-gloved hands.

"I'm getting something to drink," he said after a moment. "Want anything?"

"No, I'm good."

He returned with a Vitamin Water.

"Those any good?" asked Logan.

Kurt shrugged. "It was in the fridge."

Logan leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the dash.

Kurt eyed the dangerous proximity of Logan's boots to a slew of delicate controls. "Good thing Scott's not here."

"Yup."

Kurt sipped his water. "Amanda knows me too well," he said finally. "We know _each other_ too well."

"Doesn't let you get away with anything, huh?"

"_Nein_."

"That her problem or yours?"

"_Both_."

"Diplomatic."

"Yes, and it's the _truth_. It will work for a while, and then we drive each other crazy—the _wrong_ kind of crazy. The last time we broke up, it was after a period in which we were not only siblings and lovers but _teammates_. For a while it was wonderful. And then it wasn't. I still don't even know what happened. She broke up with me through _Peter_. But then, her body might have been possessed by my foster mother at the time…"

"Um… what?"

"_Please_ don't ask."

"Fair enough." Logan used his tongue and lips to shift the toothpick in his mouth to the opposite corner. "I've never been too good at that either. Lovers and teammates."

Kurt denied the urge to examine Logan's face, determined to act casual. "You're thinking of you and Jean…?"

"Talk about complicated."

"I would have to agree. What is it with you and redheads, anyway?"

"Let's not go there."

"_Agreed_," Kurt assented earnestly, deciding to change the subject. "How's Kitty? I rarely get a chance to see her anymore. I hear she's really come into her own."

"Not surprising."

"No. She's always been more than capable, one of the bravest people I've ever met. It was just a matter of growing up."

"Remember when we razzed her about wrecking the Danger Room fending off the brood? Hard to think of her now as the same kid that ran away crying from being laughed at by the likes of us."

"I felt very badly about that," said Kurt seriously. "She was very young. She deserved our support."

Logan snorted. "She also deserved a wake up call. Remember how she treated you those first few weeks? She'd practically flinch every time you came in the room."

"Yes, but that's something I'm used to. I should not have let it get to me."

"Nobody's got the right to treat you that way, elf."

Genuine surprise overcame Kurt's determination to remain casual. When he looked at Logan the lines around his liquid, golden eyes conveyed a mixture of compassion and confusion.

"Where did that come from?"

Logan shrugged. "Maybe I missed you."

Kurt blinked. "I… Missed you too, Logan."

"You want to start our descent?"

Seeing that they were, in fact, approaching their coordinates, Kurt returned his attention to the controls, this time in earnest.

"Starting descent."

Once they'd landed, expecting the usual dressing down by the local law enforcement, Kurt was pleasantly surprised that Logan generated hearty, welcoming handshakes all around, a somewhat ridiculous rehearsal of "local boy makes good." Kurt, however, did garner a few of the customary slack-jawed stares and equally obvious attempts not to stare. More often than not, Kurt found such reactions more comical than threatening. Regardless, though, he did his best to finesse the situation with plenty of smiles and a jovial attitude—in his experience, just the act of speaking to people usually did a lot to convince them he was neither monster nor beast.

"Whew—All that getup and you can also disappear from one spot and reappear in another? Just by thinkin' about it?" quipped one brave, particularly sage young officer.

"Ja," Kurt grinned. "Remarkable, isn't it? Now, let's get to work."


	3. The Fight

Chapter 3: The Fight

A quarter hour later, Kurt and Logan were in the familiar midst of a bareknuckle brawl with a group of perimeter guards. A flurry of Kurt's teleports popped around Logan's slashing, kicking body. Each time Kurt 'ported, he materialized just long enough to land a well-placed blow so that all Logan saw was a fragmented set of fists, feet, and, no doubt most unnerving to their opponents, a sharply jerking, forked tail. Once they'd disabled the squad between them, Kurt appeared whole at Logan's side. His tail dropped several guns at their feet.

"This is no time to get fancy," Logan reminded him.

"I agree," said Kurt. "But it is also not a time to leave dangerous weapons in the hands of our opponents if we can help it."

"What's next?"

"We need to get into that building," said Kurt, gesturing to a seemingly derelict, medium-sized office tower some 400 meters to the west. Most of the windows were broken, the concrete crumbling in several spots.

"Top or bottom?"

"Nein. Ororo gave us the floor plan. I can take us inside."

"You sure?"

"Are you?"

"Let's saddle up."

Two nearly spontaneous "bamfs," a brimstone stench, and a faintly turned stomach had Logan appear, by Kurt's side, amid a crush of broken, discarded office supplies. A hail of gunfire greeted them almost immediately as Kurt teleported them a second time to a corner behind a pile of debris, including a large, metal desktop that Logan promptly kicked onto its side to serve as a shied. Kurt crouched tightly next to him. Several bullets wracked and dented the desktop's metal hide as Logan peeked his head around its corner to get a look at the shooters.

"You get in behind," said Logan. "I'll make sure they're looking at me when you get there."

"Ja."

In the same moment that Kurt vanished, Logan lunged forward. At least two bullets ripped into his guts and shoulders, one just grazing his temple. Within seconds, a pile of wounded, unconscious bodies lay at Kurt and Logan's feet.

"Are you okay?" asked Kurt.

Logan nodded. "Next?"

"We need to go floor by floor. We have no idea how many there are, or where the hostages might be."

At that moment, a cry of pain or fear echoed a loud, crackling energy discharge.

"That's a laser rifle," said Logan. "Three above."

"Wunderbar. That wasn't in the briefing."

"We need to move quick. You ready?"

"Let's go."

Logan wrenched Kurt's body to the ground as soon as they materialized, just saving him from being sliced in two by a sizzling bolt of energy. Kurt 'ported them away to the floor above, but not in time to keep Logan from being clipped in the shoulder.

"Thanks," Kurt panted as they materialized. "That wasn't such a great idea. I didn't think there'd be so many."

Blood was oozing profusely from Logan's long, clean cut.

"Logan—!Your arm…?"

It was amazing to Logan how alarmed Kurt could look at his injuries knowing so well how quickly they'd heal.

"It'll be fine in a minute. How do you want to do this?"

"I can get down there and start teleporting the hostages if you're able to distract the soldiers. But with laser rifles there's always danger of collateral damage. We can't risk the chance of them hitting any adjacent buildings—some of them are occupied."

"Then we need to be fast," said Logan. "I counted 26 hostages, 6 guards but probably more on the way. How many trips will it take you to evacuate?"

"At least three, I think, if I'm going to get them far enough away."

"Play it safe. Take four. We'll try to disable as many guards as we can on the first pass, then deal with them as they come while you finish evacuating."

"Ja. You ready?"

Logan flexed his shoulder. The blood had already coagulated and the edges of the wound were starting to knit. "Let's do it."

The next two minutes were a blur of crunching bones and metal, screams, and tangled arms and legs. Kurt had just returned from dropping off the third group of hostages when the reinforcements arrived, ten large men fully equipped with state-of-the-art body armour and two more laser rifles between them. Logan saw Kurt somersault high into the air above one of the rifle's sizzling bolts; he knew the fact that Kurt didn't simply teleport to avoid the bolt must mean he was tired from doing the evacuations, looking to conserve energy to make sure he had enough strength for the final effort. Even without teleporting, though, Kurt reached the new group in two leaps while Logan was still tied up with the final member of the original squad. Kurt used one man's helmeted head as a hand prop for two footed kick to the unprotected neck of one of the laser rifle-armed men, staggering him and giving Kurt a window of opportunity to use his tail to fling the dangerous weapon out of the action. But in the moment it took for Kurt to remove the rifle, he left himself open to a half-connecting punch to the side of the head that disoriented him just long enough for another man to land a heavy-booted kick to the side of his face.

Logan heard the soft crunch of Kurt's bones and the grunt of pain that echoed it like a knife through his heart.

"Elf!"

Dispatching his final sparring partner with a decisive blow, Logan hurried, claws barred, into the midst of the reinforcements. Two quick, sharp swipes cleared a path to Kurt. For a moment they fought back to back against the tide closing in on them, Logan feeling Kurt's tail lash across him in the close quarters.

"Kurt—get the rest of the hostages out of here!"

"I won't leave you—there are too many!"

"No there ain't."

"Logan—!"

"Go!"

Concern for the hostages, who were still huddled, terrified but surprisingly quiet in the far corner of the room, made Kurt's choice for him. He vaunted off one man and over another, using a whipping twist of his tail around a third's neck to toss him into one of his companions as he extricated himself from the fight. As Kurt readied the hostages for evacuation, Logan heard but didn't see the preparatory charge of the remaining laser rifle; but he didn't have to see to know where the shot would be headed, and although Kurt had mutant reflexes he didn't have eyes in the back of his head, not to mention that fact that he was also partly spent. Logan leapt in the direction of the shooter and stopped him the surest, fastest way he knew how. Not for the first time, he hoped Kurt would forgive him.

The sound of the blood spattering back against Logan's mask was followed a second later by the combusting air of Kurt's safe and successful teleport of the hostages. Logan drove his claws through several more armoured chests in the frenzied seconds that followed before things cleared out enough for him to refocus on non-lethal subjugation. By that point, however, several corpses already lay at his feet.

In just a few more minutes, the whole thing was over, Logan wiping sweat and blood from his face with the back of his hand, breathing deeply and slowly with a meditative, after-fight calm as he felt his many wounds begin to heal within and without his body. Logan waited for Kurt patiently. He knew there would be a painful scene, but he was prepared to face it; it wasn't the first difficult decision he'd made in his life and he knew it wouldn't be the last.

When Kurt finally did reappear amid the carnage, Logan felt justified in his actions just looking at him. Blood oozed from a gash that had torn his uniform across his ribs, and there was blood on his face, too, his right eye winching in pain at the corner of a fist-sized area of his cheekbone that was already darkening to a blue-black splotch. Logan has seen Kurt hurt much worse many times but it never got any easier. Smelling Kurt's blood dripping and drying in his fur, seeing the subtle hitches of his injury-damaged body as he moved, Logan felt like bringing the dead men back to life so he could have the pleasure of killing them again. Yet he was also ashamed of his thoughts—especially in front of Kurt.

As he absorbed the reality of the scene surrounding him, Kurt's reaction was, as Logan had expected, severe. At first his whole person seemed to whither in something like exhausted disappointment. Then, suddenly, his demeanour changed. His brow furrowed, his arms tensed his hands into tight fists, and his tail rose up to make sharp, threatening jabs at the air behind his head.

"What the _hell_ happened here?" he demanded, accent thick with anger.

"I had to make a decision," said Logan, keeping his voice carefully neutral. "I'm sorry."

"_Sorry?_" Kurt repeated incredulously, white-booted feet stepping over corpses as he advanced on Logan, eyes burning, fangs barred, tail still darting, threatening. Even Logan sometimes forgot how truly menacing Kurt could make himself when he wanted to. In such a moment of hot, severe fury, he truly resembled a vengeful demon. And then there was the accent that, when Kurt became intensely angry, always conjured up bad memories that Logan couldn't quite grasp.

"I leave for a _moment_, and these people end up _dead_! We could have found a better way!"

"Kurt," Logan began, still forcing himself to stay calm. "These guys had laser rifles and they were gunning for blood. The amount of firepower they had with them—They knew what they were getting into and these civilians didn't deserve—"

"You think I don't know that?" Kurt took another quick, forceful step toward him as he cut him off mid-speech. "Have you forgotten how many years we've done this together?"

"Have _you_?"

"You know what happened! You weren't just thinking of hostages and civilians you were thinking of…" he growled with frustration at he tailed off, a two-fingered hand clutching his temples.

"He would have—"

"Do not lie to me!" Kurt barked. "Do _not_ start with me if you're going to lie!"

"Hey, y_ou're_ the one started this, whatever this is."

Kurt pivoted away from him with an angry, dismissive wave of his hand. "No _you_ started it, Wolverine! You started it when you decided to disregard my command and take things into your own hands! People wonder why I've always proven such an ineffective leader of the X-Men. How can I be expected to lead anyone here toward anything when even my closest _friend_ doesn't respect my judgement? _Mein Gott_, Logan! When I led Excalibur, virtually _shocked_ realizing how good I actually was at it, I had this premonition about my role within the X-Men, that maybe you all thought about me as your _mascot_ rather than a full fledged team member as capable of leading as the rest of you. It was a terrifying thought for me, that even my own dearest friends might have been thinking about me that way…"

"Listen, Kurt…"

"And what's going on between you and Ororo, anyway?" Kurt blurted out unexpectedly. "It was always _Jean_ with you, why now all of a sudden do you have to… _Ach_!"

Kurt punctuated his cry of frustration with a fearsome kick at the exposed concrete wall. But it wasn't truly fury anymore, just frustration; Logan knew he wasn't angry enough to be really off kilter, not angry enough to hurt himself. Still facing away from Logan, Kurt placed both his hands on the wall where he'd kicked it and sunk his head down between his arms, his whole lean body still taught with agitation, tail lowered but still darting jerkily.

"This ain't really about 'Ro, is it?" Logan said after a moment.

"No!"

"So what is it about? I mean really?"

"You, me… I don't know! I just don't know if I can _do_ this anymore."

"Do what?"

"This… Trying to make excuses to myself for your behaviour, trying to convince myself that we're doing the right thing when the methods you use… they go against everything I believe in, everything that I want to believe is good about myself. You always want to be told you are not an animal… I need to make sure I can tell myself that I am not a _monster_."

"Elf…" Logan stepped forward to put his hand on his friend's shoulder but as he touched him Kurt recoiled so violently Logan almost thought he might attack.

"Don't—!"

Everything Kurt thought about saying died within him before reaching his lips. He'd said so much already that he wished he could take back; not because he hadn't meant it, or even because he was scared he'd hurt Logan's feelings, since he well knew Logan was more than capable of handling verbal abuse, even from a friend. Instead, he wanted to take it back because of what it did to him to be angry with his best friend. To hate Logan, to shut him out of his heart, was not something he wanted to do. Indeed, it was not something he was sure he was capable of doing. But Kurt knew: when Logan made the decision to switch to lethal force he hadn't just been worried about the hostages or the probably distant possibility of civilian casualties—he'd also acted to protect him. Not for the first time, Logan's brand of friendship had Kurt choking on a toxic mixture of guilt and gratitude.

"Call Storm," Kurt said finally. "I'll meet you outside. Then you can capitalize on your reputation with the locals to explain what happened. God knows they won't want to hear about it from me."

With his customary burst of smoke, Kurt disappeared. Slowly, deliberately, Logan unclipped his radio from his belt and punched in their team leader's frequency.

"'Ro? Yeah, it's over."


	4. Back at the Mansion

Chapter 4: Back at the Mansion

"Gin!"

Rachel Grey spread her handful of cards proudly across the table.

"Oh for…" Kitty Pryde grumbled with mock frustration as she began to gather up the cards. "That's 4 games in a row! Do _not_ lie to me and say you're not using your powers!"

"Hey! I'm not taking the blame for your inadequacies!"

"Hmph."

But Kitty was smiling behind her put-upon frown. It felt like ages since she and Rachel had been like this. Sans immediate crisis, for once they were able to act like exactly what they were: young women sorely in need of some good old-fashioned _normal_ fun. Like kidding each other over a game of cards on a Saturday afternoon.

"Okay, _I'll_ deal this one."

Just as Kitty began shuffling, the peace was broken by a rather violent wrenching open of the main door. In stalked Kurt followed a few feet behind by Logan.

"Welcome back guys!" Kitty greeted, swinging around in her chair to look at them; in her good mood she didn't immediately register the rather obvious tension between the two men, highlighted by Kurt's grim visage and tired, unhappy tail. "You two have been gone all day. How'd it go?"

"Hi Kitty, Rachel," Kurt greeted them unenthusiastically. "I need a shower. Wolverine, I will meet you in the briefing room for our rundown with Storm in half an hour."

"Sounds good."

With that Kurt left, Logan lingering a moment longer to spare them both an awkward walk together to the dormitory. By now, both Rachel and Kitty had registered the tension.

"What was _that_ all about?" asked Rachel.

"Nothin'. We've just had kind of a long day. How're you guys doing?"

"Fine," answered Kitty. "Problems on the mission?"

"Leave it. It was just a bit messy. But anyway I got to get going myself so I'll see you ladies later. Take it easy."

Rachel and Kitty waited two full minutes after Logan has left the room to make sure their conversation would be out of the range of his enhanced senses.

"Logan covering up for _Kurt's_ rudeness…? That's something you don't see every day. Did you pick up anything from either of them?"

Rachel shook her head. "Just quick impressions. Kurt was upset about something, but I guess that much was pretty obvious without telepathy. His thoughts were jumbled, though, anger but also a lot of stuff mixed up. But Logan was clearer. He mostly seemed… hurt?"


	5. Storm Clouds

Chapter 5: Storm Clouds

Storm looked out at the groomed lawns beyond the wide, fat leaves of one of the many tropical ferns surrounding the large picture window of her expansive, upper level, corner room. She had just finished hearing a report about how, once again, the X-Men's peaceful intentions had been compromised by unreasoning human brutality. Kurt and Logan were sitting on the couch across from her, transformed by casual attire from soldiers into men; Kurt's painfully pinched black eye, though, recalled the battle. As she turned to regard them, Logan met her gaze while Kurt stared down at his hands. Ororo took a moment to contemplate the two men sitting before her, so different and yet, she knew, so much the same. Both of them felt so deeply but their coping strategies were different. Though she knew it was a minority view, Ororo considered Logan's ways of coping with stress healthier because they were something she could understand—he dealt in actions. But Kurt, beneath his everyday congeniality, his overt tenderness and warm smiles, tended to bury his conflicts within himself; despite Logan's notoriously long and mysterious past, on an emotional level it was really Kurt who was the greater mystery.

"Sounds like you did what needed to be done," she told them. "It's not quite the public relations coup we were hoping for, but Logan's clout with the Canadian government will likely smooth things over. It's regrettable, but good job anyway."

"Thanks 'Ro. I better take off, said I'd give Cyke a hand with that new jalopy of his. See you around."

"I should be going as well," said Kurt, though he waited until Logan had already closed the door behind him before rising.

"Kurt, wait."

Ororo walked toward him; Kurt turned just halfway around to face her, as though to indicate that he really was in a hurry.

"What is it?"

"Is everything okay?"

"It's nothing, it's fine," he assured her unconvincingly, though genuinely wishing to spare her from the troubled thoughts that, when he stood before her, began to seem so utterly childish. "No," he started again, turning all the way round to face her and sighing deeply. "No, it really is fine. I'm just tired. Really."

"Kurt…" She reached up and cupped the uninjured side of his face with her hand, her fingers feeling the still-damp edges of his blue-black hair while her thumb traced the velvet-soft edge of his pointed ear.

Kurt closed his eyes, equal parts savouring and steeling himself against her touch. He finally reached up his own arm to disengage her hand.

"It really is nothing."

"If it was nothing you wouldn't want me not to touch you."

"I…"

And then her body was suddenly very close to his, the curve of her breasts, unencumbered beneath her scarlet wrap, just gazing his chest at the triangle of sleek fur left exposed by his low-buttoned henley. Kurt felt a mixture of warmth and anguish wash over him. His muscles felt tight and twisted on his bones that seemed to creak with every tiny movement.

"Yes, Kurt?"

But she would never make the first move. And Kurt, for his part, was virtually incapable of doing so. Not only was Ororo one of his closest friends, she was also team leader, and besides that, Kurt couldn't completely erase a fear he harboured that to admit his own desire would be a fundamental breach of trust. Whatever Ororo's body might seem to imply, Kurt knew her sensuality was a part of her nature, so that jumping to conclusions could be dangerous. Kurt was paralysingly afraid that presuming her body language to be any kind of sexual advance might irreparably damage their friendship; even more fundamentally, though, he was worried it might suggest a lack of respect for the purity of the sensuality that he knew was virtually hardwired into her DNA as a mutant elemental.

Kurt decided that he could, at least for the moment, be honest about one thing. "Wolverine and I had a… disagreement about the methods he used on the mission. Nothing new, really—I don't know why I'm letting it get to me so much."

"You didn't want him to use lethal force."

"It's more than that, though. I was mission leader and while I didn't explicitly _order_ him not to use lethal force, he would have _known_ that. But he did it anyway. But really, that isn't even it. Maybe…" he sighed heavily, tiredly. "Maybe I'm worried that he was right, and I feel like there was a time when I would have been sure he was wrong. And I'm worried for what that says about who I've become, the moral compromises that being an X-Man have forced me to make, especially lately. It's just… It's silly, really. None of this is new and I'm an adult, I need to take responsibility for my own actions. It's not Wolverine's fault."

"It's not your fault either, Kurt."

"I know."

"Are you sure?"

Her eyes, wide and a clear, otherworldly pale blue when she wasn't using her powers, seemed to not so much bore into him as wash over him; her concern, her empathy, ignited by the vibrancy of her warm and beautiful soul, was like a physical tide. Once again, Kurt felt himself longing to be truly enveloped by that tide, in body as well as soul. But he'd had years to practice resisting such desires.

"I'm sure." He tried to smile as he softly squeezed her upper arm. "But I really do have to be going. I'll see you later…?"

"Logan and I are… We'll be out." Ororo fumbled slightly, uncharacteristically. But Kurt, with practiced ease, smoothed things over so that any casual observer—though not, perhaps, a close friend—would have assumed that nothing was amiss.

"Not to worry. I'm going to take an opportunity to catch up with Kitty before her team has to run off again. Have a good time."

He turned once more to leave.

"Oh, and Kurt…?"

"Hm?"

"You haven't forgotten about Melody Mitchell's TV crew coming tomorrow, right?"

"No, but I thought that was just for Scott's team."

"It was supposed to be, but the XSE's recent activities have been garnering some public interest and, well, I told them some members of our team would be willing to sit down with Ms. Mitchell for a few minutes. I recommended you. I… I hope you don't mind."

"Me?" Kurt really was genuinely surprised as he faced her, indigo brow furrowed above his widened golden eyes. "Does… um… Does she know who I am?"

"She knows you're one of the core leaders of the XSE, and a wonderful spokesperson for the peace and forgiveness we support."

"And yes," she added, smiling with compassion and a hint of gentle humour as she finally addressed his real question. "I have warned the young lady about your devilish good looks and charm. She's anxious to meet you."

"Yes, I'm sure. And what time is this circus set to begin?"

"The crew should be arriving about noon. They'll have a firmer schedule once they arrive but your interview should be sometime in the early afternoon."

"Danke. Now I really do need my beauty sleep. See you tomorrow!"

"Goodbye, Kurt."

Once the door had closed behind him, Ororo released a long, slow breath that felt like it had been uncomfortably imprisoned within her lungs for an eternity. She wrapped her arms around herself and leaned her body against the wall as though all her formidable strength had suddenly abandoned her. She even felt a vague twinge of what people without mutant elemental powers might have called cold. She wasn't bothered by her not-so-subtle actions manipulating Kurt into doing the interview; she knew he would have agreed to do it, regardless. But she was bothered by Kurt disengaging her touch. For one thing, it was yet more evidence of the suppressed desire in Kurt that Ororo had long suspected. More troubling, however, was her realization that she'd been upset about his breaking contact because she hadn't wanted to stop touching him—that she wanted to touch more of him, that she wished she were touching him now, and that his unique, two-fingered hands and forked tail were touching her. She shuddered against the urge to run after him, and returned to her mission reports.


	6. The Truth Challenge

Chapter 6: The Truth Challenge

In an extremely rare example of true loafing, Kitty and Rachel's late afternoon card playing had dissolved into early evening TV watching. They didn't watch anything in particular; both of them so seldom had a chance to watch TV of any kind that they were almost completely out of touch with any and all programs. Almost.

"Ah!" squealed Rachel. "Dancing with the Stars!"

"Oh my God—is that… _Joey McIntyre_?"

"Who?"

"Why are you even excited about this show if you don't know who Joey McIntyre is?"

Rachel shrugged. "I like watching lowly humans trying to be graceful?"

"God… Kurt should be on this show. He's a celebrity, right?"

"I'm never clear on that. Does the public actually know who we are?"

"I don't think Kurt's washed up enough, regardless."

"He wouldn't do it, anyway. I think he's even more nervous about public exposure since you told him about 'furries.'"

Kitty squealed with laughter. "You know what was great about that? You could tell he already knew. I mean, not about that actual group, but… He _knew_."

"Poor Kurt…"

"Oh, he knows we love him—fur and all. Seriously, though, what do you think was going on with him and Logan this afternoon?"

"Maybe it was just the mission. You know how it goes sometimes. People died."

"_Bad_ people. _Very_ bad people. No, but I mean generally. Those two usually get on like a house on fire. It's not unlike someone else to be fighting with Logan but it's not like Kurt. Which is kind of weird now that I think about it."

"Why?"

"Oh I don't know… When I first joined the X-Men, Kurt and Logan were really joined at the hip—they were like a couple of frat boys goofing off behind the stiff back of Old Man Cyclops, aka 'crusty dean.' But even then, I mean, even just between the way they look and their accents, they were also like a classic odd couple. I didn't really think anything of it back then. To be honest, they both sort of scared me for different reasons so I kind of left well enough alone. But as I got to know them better over the years… They really are kind of completely opposite people."

Rachel frowned thoughtfully. "In some ways. But they're really alike, too, in other ways. Important ways. Logan might call himself a hardcase but he's more like Kurt than he'd want people to know."

"Agreed. But what about Kurt? Don't you ever wonder what he sees in Logan? I mean, he's someone who's sworn never to kill anyone and Logan, well… Logan kills lots of people."

"But Kurt loves him."

"What?"

Rachel tapped her skull. "Telepath."

"But what do you mean he…?"

"As a _friend_, Kitty! Jesus! Do you really think _Kurt_ would… and with _Logan_?"

"No but… I don't know! Crap, now I'm going to be thinking about why my brain went that way."

"Trust me, Kurt is _very_ straight."

"Trust _you_? Why? _Oh my God what happened?_"

Rachel kept her eyes on the TV, smiling mischievously. "Oh, nothing."

"Not nothing! Something! C'mon, what happened? Did you and Kurt…?"

"It was just a kiss," Rachel said, attempting to forestall any further wild speculations. "We were playing pirates in the danger room and—"

"—oh my _God_—"

"—and anyway, we both got a bit carried away, and… well… We kissed. It was… nice."

"_Nice?_ Oh my God. Who made the first move? No, wait. You were playing pirates. It was definitely Kurt. The _nerve_!"

"But I wasn't complaining." Rachel's eyes turned almost wistful. "Do you know what his fur actually feels like up close? It's like—"

"Like _velvet_," Kitty supplied. "Yes, me and the _internet_ have heard. But God Rach, is anything going to… I mean, do you think it's going anywhere? Sounds like you enjoyed it!"

"Dunno. Kurt seems kind of all over the place right now."

"Wasn't he seeing that nurse with the big…"

"_Christine_. I think that's over. She moved back home to be with her folks."

"Oh. Too bad. She, uh… seemed nice."

"Uh _huh_. But I think the real problem is him and Storm."

"_Ororo_? What the—? Why did I have to leave just when things started getting interesting? Kurt and _Ororo_?"

"Where _have_ you been? Practically everyone has heard about their little sky waltzing date from a few weeks ago."

"_What?_"

"Doesn't matter. He's kind of hung up on her, anyway. And she's maybe hung up on him, too, but who can really tell with her. And I mean, that's coming from a telepath. But she's also gone out with Logan a few times recently so—Oh."

"Do you think it could really be that simple?" asked Kitty, arriving at the same obvious thought. "They've all been friends for _so long_."

"Has something like that ever come between them before?"

"Not that I know of… Although I remember a pretty forceful reaction from Logan when Kurt swooped down to kiss Mariko under the mistletoe one Christmas Eve… But that was just jokes… I _think_… But then there's that whole weirdness with _Mystique_…" Kitty trailed off as she caught Rachel's eyes look up and past her at someone entering the room.

"Speak of the devil," Rachel turned on a high wattage smile as Kurt sauntered toward them.

Kitty glanced at her quickly, a wave of annoyed recognition sweeping over her. What was that smile? God, was she going to be wondering about Rachel's every gesture around Kurt now? How could she, anyway? He was like their big brother or uncle or something. Jeesh.

"Ladies."

Kurt was dressed casually in black pants and a soft grey Henley, buttons disregarded. Kitty frowned at the unwelcome combination of Rachel's glittering eyes and Kurt's clothing choice, which, she reflected, couldn't help but remind Rachel that his "velvet" fur went _all the way down_. "So damn _German_," Kitty complained inwardly, still eying Rachel. "You never see Scott Summers treat buttons on a shirt as optional." Kurt's right eye was slightly pinched by a large bruise on his cheek that appeared as an almost-black splotch beneath his indigo fur; there were two small strips of white tape at the crest of his cheekbone where his skin had been broken.

Despite herself, Kitty performed a quick thought experiment in which she tried to imagine Kurt through a lover's eyes. While Kurt's appearance frightened and disgusted certain inescapable bigots, the truth was that, beneath his litany of mutations, Kurt was an attractive man, with graceful cheekbones, well-formed lips, and a warm, disarming smile—not to mention his super-humanly toned body. Kitty had had Kurt's fundamental attractiveness confirmed to her many years ago when he and the other X-Men had been temporarily transformed into 'normal' humans by the High Evolutionary. In large part, the incident had been so confusing that Kitty had since done her best to forget it. However, she remembered distinctly what Kurt had looked like because seeing him that way had been so traumatic. Her dominant memory from the whole experience was the overwhelming anxiety she'd felt hearing Kurt's voice emerge from a pink, Caucasian face; she remembered trying desperately to gauge the authenticity of her dear friend's altered appearance with an unsettled probing of black pupil-ed, brown irises that were so unsettlingly unfamiliar, so clearly not Kurt's.

Kitty suddenly wondered why it had never before struck her as strange that when Kurt used an image inducer, he rarely appeared as a 'normal' version of himself, usually opting for a different face altogether. But then, just as suddenly, she realized that it wasn't strange at all. Kurt was Kurt and not that man with the brown eyes and five-fingered hands that the High Evolutionary's magic-outer-space-science had once conjured. And his sexiness really stemmed from that, from the bodily exoticness that he virtually took for granted, to the point where he considered a 'normal' version of his real face as alien as a stranger's.

Also, he _was_ very soft… Still, though: he was like her uncle and no matter how hard she tried she couldn't share Rachel's interest in liplocking with him. Bleh.

"Nice shiner," Kitty observed.

"Isn't it, though? It feels as good as it looks, believe me."

Kurt cracked open a beer as he came toward them before collapsing sideways into the large adjacent armchair, one large blue foot dangling over the arm closest to them.

"You weren't really talking about me, surely."

"Sort of," Kitty fibbed. "You know. Reminiscing."

"Ah, yes, the good old days. When we lived in a cold damp lighthouse whenever we weren't lost in a parallel dimension. Which, as I recall, was most of the time. I honestly remember seeing virtually nothing of England the whole time we were in Excalibur."

"Agreed," said Kitty. "And living in that lighthouse really was _too_ intimate."

"Ha!" Kurt flashed a glimpse of his fang-y but—Kitty once again had to admit—charming grin, though the effect was somewhat marred by the current shiner-induced asymmetrical slant of his face. "Things certainly became that way after a while. Though some of us suffered worse than others."

"I remember cutting off your cast," said Kitty, smiling back at him. "I've never seen you act like such a baby."

"Ach! You don't know what it's like to have your fur encased in plaster for six weeks! I thought I'd go mad!"

"Baby."

Kurt put down his beer long enough to raise his body with his arms so he could take a playful swipe at Kitty with his dangling foot.

"Didn't even have to phase to avoid _that_!"

Kurt sipped his beer as he settled back into his chair. "Ja, well, I must be getting old."

Kitty sighed dramatically. "Aren't we all…"

"Don't make me come over there, Katzchen. So is this really how the two of you are spending your Saturday night? What are you even watching?"

"Is this how _you're_ spending your Saturday night?" Kitty retorted. "Drinking beer and teasing _young girls_?"

If either Kurt or the suspiciously silent Rachel picked up on her innuendo they made no sign.

"Would it even things out if I fetched the two of _you_ something to drink?" Kurt offered.

"Oh yes please!"

_Finally, Rachel pipes up_, thought Kitty.

"And you, Katzchen?"

"So now you're spending your Saturday night feeding alcohol to minors?" With her second reference to their ages Kitty felt Rachel's glare hot on her cheek.

"Well, the drinking age in Germany is 18, and besides, my rule is if you're old enough to save the world you're old enough to enjoy a cold beer."

"Works for me," Rachel agreed, eyes still locked on Kitty's cheek.

Kurt disappeared in a puff of smoke and Kitty immediately whipped her head around to meet Rachel's glare with her own.

"What is going _on_ with you?" Rachel demanded. "You can't seriously be mad about… It was just a silly little thing!"

"But it's _Kurt_. And he should _know better_."

"Since when has _that_ been true? We were just talking about the time Brian Braddock snapped Kurt's femur for having lustful dreams about his fiancé!"

"They weren't engaged at the time!"

"Does it _matter_?"

"_Doesn't_ it?"

"Just… drop it, okay? _Nothing's _going on. Nothing _will_ go on. Trust me."

Kitty knew she was out of time to respond even before Kurt reappeared in front of them, holding three beers between his four fingers.

"Forgive me, Katzchen," he said, as he handed a beer to Rachel and then Kitty, keeping the third as a backup for himself. "But I anticipated your surrender to peer pressure. I hope that doesn't make me a bad authority figure."

"It does, but thanks anyway, fuzzy," Kitty took the beer and a deep breath, determined to file her concerns away in the back of her mind for another time. Rachel was probably right, anyway. Nothing would happen. It was just a kiss. Just Kurt playing pirates and getting carried away (which was certainly nothing new). But even the possibility that it might be something more still threw her for a loop, making her question a thousand past situations and conversations. Did either Kurt or Rachel have real feelings for each other? And if so, did they have those feelings back in their Excalibur days? It was so weird to think about, thought Kitty; like finding out your parents aren't your real parents or something, so that everything you thought was real about your past suddenly seems skewed and alien. With a start Kitty realized: _That's what it must be like for Rachel all the time_. And she suddenly felt very guilty.

"So what _are_ you watching?" Kurt asked again as he settled back into his former position in the armchair.

"Dancing with the Stars," Rachel declared boldly.

"Oh _my_… Things really are dire."

"Yeah," agreed Kitty. "Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing out on jetting across the world to punch bad guys, but then I have a Saturday off and I realize: nothing."

They laughed and joked their way through the rest of Dancing with the Stars and then onto The Amazing Race, disappearing several beers along the way. Things really were starting to seem like old times (if they'd ever had a day off back then) by the time they started watching a rerun of Lost.

"Mien Gott," groaned Kurt. "This show makes less sense than our actual lives. Why would anyone want to torture themselves so?"

It took one more beer for Kitty to finally gather the courage to ask what she'd been wanting to ask for the past two hours. "So… What happened between you and Logan? You guys have some kind of falling out or something?"

"What makes you say that?" Kurt asked, hesitating slightly. By that time he had flipped himself around in his chair, head hanging down over the front of the seat so that he was looking at the TV upside down, legs and tail sprawled across and over the chair's arm and back, two fingered hands steadying the beer that he rested against his ribs.

"C'mon, you guys were barely speaking when you got back today. And your tail was all 'in the doghouse.'"

"You cannot seriously believe you're able to reliably map all of my emotions onto my tail."

"No," Kitty agreed. "But my best friend's also a telepath."

Kurt sighed, knowing he'd been beaten. "_Ja_. We had an argument. But it was nothing. I'm sure time will return things to their normal bent."

"Are you sure that's all it was?" Rachel pried tentatively. "Logan seemed really… hurt."

"Hurt?" Kurt repeated, raising his head slightly to get a better look at Rachel's face. "I'm sure you're mistaken."

"I don't usually make mistakes like that, Kurt."

"Well I don't know… I said something to him about… About him and the other X-Men not respecting my authority. Something that I remembered feeling back with Excalibur, when I was seized with this fear that the X-Men thought of me as their _mascot_… Stupid, I shouldn't have said anything. But I… I was angry. Yet I was angry with myself as well. It's not fair to blame Wolverine for my own inadequacies as a leader."

"Oh fuzzy," Kitty felt the remains of her anger melt away in a moment. "Oh! I mean, not fuzzy like something diminutively cute, like a _toy_ or anything, just—"

"_Kitty_." Rachel hissed. "Stop talking."

"Not to worry, Katzchen," Kurt smiled tightly in a brave effort to regain a lighthearted attitude. "I'm well aware that my cuteness is a curse as well as a blessing."

"But you're a great leader!" Kitty insisted. "Don't let _Scott_ get to you—he's like that with everyone."

"Ja, I know. But it's not Scott. It's something else. I'm not sure quite yet whether I really understand it myself."

"Does it have anything to do with you and Ororo?"

"Oh dear…" seeing that the conversation was getting serious, Kurt shifted himself back into a normal sitting position. "Who told you about _that_?"

"Rachel."

"So I suppose Rachel also told you about…"

"You and I in the Danger Room? Yes, I told her," Rachel admitted, adding quickly after a brief pause, "But I also told her it was nothing. Just us getting carried away." She wished she hadn't added the second part when she saw a vaguely pained look pass over Kurt's face.

"So what _is_ going on with you and Ororo?" Kitty asked again quickly to forestall a different conversation that she knew should take place in private between Kurt and Rachel.

"Well that's an _easy_ question," said Kurt, leaning back in his chair. "_Nothing_ is happening between me and Ororo."

"And between her and Logan…?"

"You will have to ask Wolverine and Storm," said Kurt. There was only a hint of bitterness in his tone but his use of codenames to refer to his friends was a dead giveaway, as was his syntax; Kitty knew that Kurt's accent didn't necessarily get thicker when he was upset but he did tend to stop using contractions, as though suddenly feeling the need to take his time and speak carefully.

"Besides, I…"

Kurt astutely trailed off at the sound of doors opening and closing in the main hallway. After a rather long pause, one set of footsteps departed up the stairs, the second heading in their direction. A moment later, Logan opened the door into the lounge.

"Evenin' folks," he drawled. He was wearing his customary jeans but had compromised on a plain white (rather than plaid) button-down shirt. He had a blazer draped over his arm.

"My, my, my, don't you clean up nice," said Kitty, giving Logan an exaggerated, head-to-toe once over.

"Don't I, though," Logan agreed. He tossed his jacket down on the arm of the chair at Rachel's side of the room and took a seat, separated from Kurt by the length of the couch. "I see you're taking good care of the girls, here, elf," he said, eying the string of discarded beer cans littering the coffee table.

"Ja, well, I knew I must be good for something." Kurt's words were joking but, intentionally or not, his tone bore an edge no one missed.

_Oh dear,_ thought Kitty. _This is bad._

She heard Rachel's voice inside her mind, asking, _How bad is it?_

Kitty thought back to the 'old days,' her first days as an X-Man. She thought about Logan coining Kurt's nickname "elf." About Kurt being the first of them to learn, or be trusted with, Wolverine's civilian name. About Kurt and Logan playing "tag" across the mansion's grounds long after everyone else had dispersed or gone to bed. About too many bedsides hovered over and distraught reactions to false alarms of death and grave injury. Mostly, though, her mind was indefinite images, smiles that reflected in each other, caring hands laid on shoulders, and even hugs—Kurt was almost certainly the only man Logan ever hugged.

Rachel saw it all as Kitty remembered it, some of it familiar, much of it new. And, having seen everything that Kitty saw, she suddenly understood how bad it was. _We need to do something_, she thought to Kitty. With the speed of thought, Kitty communicated her plan, and Rachel agreed. Kitty's next words put the plan into motion.

"How about a game?" she proposed.

"What kind of game, Katzchen?"

"A truth challenge," said Kitty. "Like truth or dare, but you don't get a choice. We just take turns and we get to ask each other questions about stuff we've always wanted to know."

"And if we don't want to answer?" Logan was looking at Kurt while Kurt went out of his way pretending not to notice.

"You get one veto," Rachel proposed. "But just one."

There was a pause as the men considered Kitty's proposition.

"Well, boys, what's it going to be?" asked Kitty. "You going to man up?"

"I'm in," Kurt agreed. "But no funny business."

"I don't know what you mean, Mr. _Wag_ner," goaded Kitty, deliberately pronouncing his name the North American way. "What about you, Logan? It only works if we're all in."

"This is a real death pact, huh? Sure, kid, I'm in, why not."

"Who gets to go first?" asked Rachel.

"I made it up," said Kitty, "So I get starter's privilege. And it's coming to you, Kurt."

"Oh joy."

"Did you have feelings for Rachel back in our Excalibur days?"

"Kitty!" Rachel protested, suddenly concerned that "the plan" might have been a deception.

"You're not wasting any time, Katzchen," Kurt frowned. "Though I thought I said no funny business."

"You agreed to the game, elf," Logan reminded him. "You owe us an answer."

Kurt's golden eyes burned at Logan, but then softened as he began to speak. "I have always loved Rachel—loved you both, Katzchen—as friends, family. But, keeping in mind that we were all much _younger_ at that time than we are now, no, I did not, in those days, have any romantic intentions—toward _either _of you."

"Well, gee, thanks, fuzzy," Kitty intoned. "Glad you felt the need to clear that up so _thoroughly_."

"My _pleasure_."

"That makes it your turn, though."

"Ah… let's see…" Kurt rearranged himself in his chair as he feigned deep thought, finally resuming a modified version of his earlier upside down position, staring up at the ceiling, beer resting on his ribs. "Why were you so afraid of me, Katzchen, when you first joined the X-Men?"

"I…" surprised, Kitty trailed off helplessly.

"No, it's okay," Kurt offered quickly, genuinely embarrassed by her reaction. "It was a stupid question. I should not have asked. It was a very long time ago."

"No, Kurt, it's okay," Kitty said, collecting herself. "It's just… It's just hard for me to remember, actually. My life before I joined and X-Men and my life after… It's like too separate people. When I first met you, I'd only heard about the existence of mutants a week before. Then I entered this whirlwind of the mansion and the Danger Room and all of you—you all seemed so… _incredible_, you had these amazing powers and lifestyle and… It was like a dream, fantastic and completely terrifying. But I guess none of that is really an answer. I guess what it really was, Kurt, was that I was just this gawky teenage nerd struggling with growing up and the emergence of my own powers at the same time… I was afraid of what was going on with me, with my body and my powers and my life, and I think… How incredibly different you seemed reminded me of the changes I was going though, and it scared me. So I was scared of you."

"I think I understand," mused Kurt, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. "It must have been hard for you, trying to assimilate so much at such a trying time. Things were so different for me. While my teleportation ability didn't emerge until puberty, I have always looked the way I do, and besides that, I certainly didn't grow up in a 'normal' environment…"

"Since it's my turn," said Kitty. "Can I ask you—have you ever wanted to be different? Have you ever wanted to be 'normal'?"

"Yes… and no. Not seriously. I dream of my appearance ceasing to be an obstacle in my life, but never at the price of my abilities. What about you? Have you ever wished you weren't a mutant?"

"Yes," Kitty admitted. "But not now. Not for a long time."

Kurt turned his head to look at her, golden eyes burning darkly. "I am glad," he said.

Kitty cleared her throat against a sudden rush of emotion. "Your turn, Logan. What's going on between you and Ororo?"

"'Going on'?" Logan repeated. "Ask me like a grownup and maybe I'll answer you like one."

"Are you two seeing each other?" Rachel provided. "Are you a couple?"

"We're friends," said Logan, with just a tinge of insistence. "We enjoy each other's company."

"Fair enough," said Kitty. "That makes it your turn, Logan."

"My lucky day," Logan smirked.

Things continued for a while in a somewhat lighter vein. Among many largely inconsequential tidbits, they learned that Kitty was fourteen when she first kissed Peter, that despite his fur Kurt still had to shave his face, that Logan's shoes were a measly size eight, and that Rachel's favourite food was spaghetti.

_We need to kickstart things_, thought Rachel.

_And I know just how to do it_, Kitty thought back.

"… that makes it your turn, Katzchen."

Kitty cleared her throat. "As I recall…" she began, examining her fingernails very seriously. "There was something about you, Kurt, that Rachel and I, dirty minded teenagers that we were, once fell into fits of giggles about, and this might be the perfect time to get it straight."

"Oh _Kitty_!" Rachel admonished, realizing where she was headed. "You _wouldn't_!"

"Hey, we're all family here," Kitty replied, lips beginning to twitch in an irrepressible reminder of her teenaged giggle fit. "And I think the viewers at home would appreciate the issue getting settled once and for all."

"_Kitty_…" Rachel pleaded again, though not very convincingly; her own lips were twitching almost uncontrollably.

"What is it? You'd better ask before you suffocate."

"Well, we've all seen you do some pretty amazing things with that tail of yours, and Rachel and I were just wondering… ahem… We were just wondering whether…" Rachel elbowed her as Kitty rallied the courage to finish. "We were just wondering whether you ever, you know… um… used your tail to masturbate."

Once Kitty finally said the words both she and Rachel succumbed to fits of laughter, clutching each other and gasping for breath in their efforts to restrain themselves.

Logan smiled and uttered a lot whistle. "Oh boy…"

Kurt just looked frozen—especially his tail, which had been swinging rhythmically back and forth near the tip.

"How can you… Why would you even…" Words failed him as he recalled Kitty's earlier complaint about Excalibur's lighthouse being "too intimate."

"Why won't you answer?" Kitty managed to sputter between laughs. "Have you got something to hide?"

"I am not going to discuss it. Veto! I use my veto for that question."

"Fine," said Kitty, finally corralling her laughter as she wiped away a streak of tears. "Then I get to give you a fill in, and it's got to be a bigger one."

"Fine. Anything."

"Your new challenge is that you have to be completely truthful with that interviewer tomorrow."

Kurt narrowed his eyes, detecting trickery. "What do you mean? Why would I be anything but truthful in any case?"

"No," asserted Kitty. "I mean _really_ truthful. I want you to pour your heart out to that woman. When she's done with you, I want her to understand you better than anyone's ever understood you before. Capice?"

Kurt stared at her, blinking slowly. "If this is just some complicated ploy to get me to answer the previous question… which I have _no idea_ why you would want to know _anyway_…"

"No, no no. This is unrelated. (And c'mon! Who would be sick enough to ask you that?) No, I just mean that you're not allowed to give those pat, scripted answers that I know Scott feeds you for this stuff. You have to actually answer _truthfully_. With the _real truth_."

"Okay," Kurt said slowly, still suspicious. "But if it is something that would be dangerous or harm our cause—"

"That goes without saying," Kitty agreed. "You get a veto for that kind of stuff, but I do expect you to use good judgement about which things really _are_ dangerous to admit on camera."

"Okay," Kurt said again, more confidently. "You've got yourself a deal. Shall we shake on it?"

They did, and then it was Kurt's turn.

"This one is for you, Rachel."

"Shoot."

"If I asked you to have dinner with me tomorrow, would you say yes?"

Kitty's jaw literally dropped, and Rachel took in a sharp breath.

"I may be wrong," intoned Logan, smiling his drooping, lazy smile. "But I think the stakes have just been raised, girls."

"Dinner?" Rachel appeared to be virtually in anguish but it was difficult for any of them to tell whether that was a good or bad sign for Kurt's suit. "You mean… Like a date?"

"Yes," Kurt smiled gently as he met her troubled gaze. "Like a date. But look at it this way: we're honour-bound by the game, so if we try it and things go horribly wrong, we both have a good excuse. What do you say?"

Rachel smiled, nervous but happy. "Yes. I would say yes."

"Seven o'clock? I think all the filming should be well over by then."

"It's, well… It's a date!"

"It's um… your turn, Rach," said Kitty shaking herself out of her virtual stupor of astonishment.

"Ah ha! So many options! But I'm going to turn to you, Logan."

Picking up on Rachel's mischievous smile, Logan warned, "If it's something I can't remember then it doesn't count."

"Fair enough. But I think this is something you should be able to answer. Does Kurt ever use his tail to—"

"Veto!" Logan interrupted her quickly.

"Thank you, mein freund."

"Anytime, elf."

_It's working already_, thought Kitty with satisfaction, hearing Rachel agree within her mind.

"Okay," said Rachel. "Then you get a repeat of Kitty's make up challenge to Kurt. You have to be totally truthful tomorrow in your interview. I want to see those emotional fireworks that you've got smouldering inside! (But, um… not the… you know… violent ones.)"

"Fine. It's a deal," Logan shook her hand firmly to secure it. "Just remember, elf, I'm doing this for you."

Kurt grinned. "But you know I'll make it up to you."

"We'll see," Logan smirked back. "And now I know that makes it my turn, but it's about time for me to get some shut eye. I guess I can just go first the next time."

Logan collected his hat from the table, nodding goodnight to everyone before he left.

"I should go, too," said Kurt, maintaining that day's pattern of he and Logan exiting rooms a minute apart. "It's been wonderful catching up, Katzchen. And I will see you tomorrow evening, Rachel."

"I look forward to it," smiled Rachel, Kitty noticing that touch of wistfulness returning to her eyes.

When they were once again left to themselves, Kitty and Rachel were wordless for several minutes, staring blankly at the muted but still flashing television.

"Do you think it will work?" Kitty asked finally.

"It's just _one date_, Kitty."

"You know what I mean!"

Rachel shrugged. "Time will tell on all fronts. But oh my _God_. What am I going to _wear_?"

Kitty hit her with a pillow.


	7. Interview Day

Chapter 7: Interview Day

For everyone at the mansion, interview day was a nightmare. The stress that always accompanied all of the X-Men's forays into any kind of public exposure was multiplied a hundredfold; almost everyone agreed that they would rather be battling Sentinals. Of course, Scott Summers, leader extraordinaire, was everywhere all day, coordinating, quietly counselling interview subjects, and flashing his blinding white smile at Melody Mitchell and all of the women on the camera crew (much to Emma Frost's exaggerated consternation). Still, though, Scott couldn't be in all places at once, and all the formidable team of Shadowcat and Marvel Girl had to do was steal two little digital recordings. In the end, the whole operation turned out to be remarkably easy. While Scott wished Melody Mitchell a heartfelt goodbye on behalf of the whole X-family, Kitty phased unnoticed into the equipment truck and snatched two DVDs helpfully labelled "Wolverine" and "Nightcrawler."

"Do you think we're doing the right thing?" asked Rachel as Kitty returned to her stakeout position around the corner from the front steps where Scott was giving Melody Mitchell a final, firm handshake.

"Chances are they never would have used this stuff anyway," Kitty reasoned. "They'll use Scott, Ororo, maybe Hank… The XSE was just a bonus for this thing anyway and I'm surprised they even let Logan talk to begin with. From what you overheard from the interviews, too, Scott would probably be pissed if we let some network keep these recordings."

Rachel folded her arms across her chest, scowling. "You know, I don't really appreciate your making fun of Scott all the time."

"Oh, I'm sorry, I just…" Kitty faltered; she sometimes forgot that Scott was—sort of—Rachel's father. "I like Scott, I do. Of course I do. It's just… Even you have to admit, he can be overbearing. But I love him, you know I do. I came back into the fold for him."

Rachel sighed. "I know, it's okay. He wasn't always easy to have as a Dad, either."

"And everyone just likes to hate the boss, right?" Kitty joked, trying to lighten the mood.

"Anyway, you're probably right," Rachel consented. "About the interviews, I mean. No one will ever know how they went missing. And we made our point—we got Logan and Kurt to open up. What are you going to do with the recordings? Are you going to keep them?"

"Probably not," Kitty lied. "It's probably better that way."


	8. Storm Breaks

Chapter 8: Storm Breaks

It was early evening by the time the television crew finally pulled away, and Kurt was exhausted. Not only had he had to spend more than half an hour unburdening himself before an attractive female stranger and a television crew—a crew that spent another fifteen minutes figuring out how _not_ to get a glare off his light-refracting fur—but he'd also had to suffer, like everyone else, through the brutal micromanagement of Scott Summers. Kurt couldn't deny that Scott was a great leader, the best person to spearhead the X-Men at the current moment. But that didn't make him any less exhausting to deal with, especially where the media was concerned.

"Remember to _smile_, Kurt—that's your asset," Scott had told him no less than three times that day. "And by all means don't _hit _on her (unless she hits on you—then _use it_). And don't hide your tail but just… be _modest_. And you know I respect your faith but… try not to talk about God if you can help it. At least the swelling around your eye has gone down…"

Kurt was just wondering whether he would have time for a decent steam-blowing-off workout before his date with Rachel when there was a knock at his door.

"Come in," he called.

"Just popping by to make sure you're still alive," said Ororo as she entered his room. Like him, she was dressed in her uniform for the interview; for her, that meant skintight black unstable molecule pants and a black bustier. She had removed her customary headpiece and cape.

"Just _barely_," Kurt replied, half seriously. "I'm not sure if I _smiled_ enough."

Ororo averted her eyes, a small, mischievous smile playing at her own lips. "Well, I understand you were with Ms. Mitchell for a long time, anyway."

"Yes I… actually sort of enjoyed the interview itself. We had a… good connection."

"Did she really ask you out?"

Kurt ran his hand through his hair, embarrassed. "Ja, but… I've had enough of reporters for the time being."

Her eyes were coy as she deadpanned, "I thought Scott told you to press your advantage."

"Perhaps I should have passed her along to Hank…?"

Ororo's face broke into a large laugh. "Perhaps. Though I'm not sure Hank has quite your litany of charms."

"Really?" Kurt mocked, feigning intrigued surprise. "Tell me more, Ms. Munroe, about these charms."

Throwing herself into the spirit of their teasing exchange, Ororo advanced slowly and at an angle, like a panther cornering its prey, checking his "charms" off thoughtfully on her fingers.

"Well," she began. "There's that smile."

"Fangs and all?"

"Rachel assures me that vampires are _so_ hot right now."

"Please, go on."

"And the _tail_."

"Ah, to be adored for the sake of my own favourite appendage—a woman after my own heart!"

"And the _fur_."

"Of _course_."

"And I hear you're _very_ flexible."

"Growing up on a trapeze will do that."

Ororo was standing—for Kurt—uncomfortably close by the time she finished her list. She paused there for a long, deliberate moment. Kurt's stomach tingled with the instinctual urge to teleport out of danger. He considered curbing the instinct by taking the almost equally awkward step of backing away, but the tip of his tail alerted him that his dresser blocked his escape route. Abruptly and mercifully, Ororo broke the moment with another burst of laughter as she stepped away to sit down on the edge of his bed. Tentatively, Kurt joined her.

"Are you really okay, though?" Ororo asked him earnestly once he was sitting next to her. "I knew it might be difficult for you. But I also thought it was important."

"For me or for the team?"

"Both. I want you to feel more confident. More than ever, we need you as a leader."

Kurt shook his head. "Leader," he repeated. "I wonder. There was a conversation I had with Scott once that I still think about. It was a long time ago, when we—our team—first got together. He was moping about Jean—it was after she'd first become Phoenix—and sort of complaining about being a mutant, about how hard he had it living every day trying to control his optic beams. He told me I might want to think life was all 'fun and games' but it wasn't like that for everyone. And I just felt so angry. He was doing that thing that he does, where he calls you by your codename to keep you at a distance. And I told him: I have a name, you know? And you think _you've_ had it hard? We never really finished the conversation, someone interrupted us, I can't remember. But it was an important moment for me. Not just because it showed me that even great leaders can loose their way, but because it showed me that I might have something, some guidance or insight, to offer someone who I thought had it all figured out. It was the first time I ever considered that, someday, I, too, might be a leader."

Ororo squeezed his hand, encouraging him to continue.

"The other conversation I always come back to," he said. "Was many years later, after I'd rejoined the team following Excalibur. I'd asked Scott for more responsibility and he set me up as the head of his second squad—Warren, Bobby, a rotating group of others. We ran into some trouble with a kind of religious cult and it turned out that my team hadn't properly communicated the info we had about the group on to Scott's team and… Anyway. I tried to brush it aside—I actually told Scott that it wasn't my fault, that I'd just 'assumed' Warren would handle it. Stupid. And Scott took me aside and let me have it. He told me that my problem was that I wanted to be everybody's best friend, but being a leader is not about being liked. And that if I was serious about leading I had to be willing to make people angry with me, no matter the consequences. And he was right, Ororo. I value friendship above all. And I do need to be liked. It protects me from being hated. It's been such a long time but I still dream about it, the look in that man's eyes as he was about to drive a stake through my heart. I couldn't talk him down, I couldn't smile at him and make it better. None of that mattered. He didn't even care that I was a mutant. He just _saw_ me and knew, was certain, that I had no human rights. I was not even an animal to that mob. I was just an aberration that deserved to die."

"I don't think even I have encountered that level of hatred," Ororo admitted. "But as a woman, and especially as a black women, I do know what it is to have your rights stripped away by a look, to have your body claimed and commodified by the enemy."

"But how do you balance that fear with your responsibilities?" asked Kurt. "How can I be the moral person I need to be so that I'm not the monster those villagers thought I was, and still make the difficult decisions a leader sometimes has to make?"

"Leadership starts in morality," Ororo told him. "But it does crystallize in a willingness to set aside the immediate and see the bigger picture—the greater good, the future world in which we will all have the human rights we deserve. I've seen you do it before."

"Yes," Kurt agreed. "I did it best back in the final days of Excalibur, but it also changed me. Maybe more than I wanted."

"Is that why you cut off all your beautiful hair and grew a goatee?" she joked, touching the edge of his hair's blue-black waves where they spilled over his forehead.

Kurt smiled playfully. "Are you sure you want to go down _that_ road?"

"I didn't say I didn't like it—you looked very… Contemporary." She pushed all his hair off his brow to mimic his past look.

"As did you in your leather bra and mohawk," Kurt returned.

"You're right…" she dropped her hand, letting his hair fall back into place. "We really _shouldn't_ go down that road."

"I definitely didn't say I didn't like it."

Ororo felt the room fading to black beyond Kurt's glowing eyes. She consciously forced herself to blink, and stood up.

"Well I'm glad everything went well. The special is supposed to air in two weeks. They said they'd send us a copy beforehand."

"Sounds good," said Kurt. He felt cold without her body next to his so he stood up, too.

"Maybe it's not the time," Ororo started, hesitatingly. "But we should talk about Logan."

"What is there to talk about?"

Kurt had taken a step closer and her pivot to face him closed the gap, their uniform-clad bodies separated by a paper-thin forcefield of decorum.

"There's… Logan and I are just friends, Kurt."

"I know. Like you and me."

"Yes. Exactly."

Through no manipulations of her own, Ororo felt a strange surge of temperature within the proximity of Kurt's body. His heartbeat pulsed through the warm air, consuming her own.

"I should go," she intoned.

"Yes."

"I have…"

"Ororo…?"

Their faces were barely inches apart, Kurt looking up slightly into her greater height. All he seemed to see were her blue eyes that—did he imagine it?—seemed to be swirling subtly with talons of white energy. He felt his fur buzz under a gentle static charge, and his body froze even more surely under the terrible concentration it took to remain still. His fur seemed to stand on end over his whole body so that all he could think about was getting out of his uniform. Getting out of his uniform and being stroked everywhere at once by this beautiful woman.

"Yes, Kurt?"

He was on the verge of whimpering in anguish trying to keep himself from physically responding, though he was vaguely aware that their bodies seemed to move closer regardless of his resistance. He was, quite literally, victim of elemental forces beyond his control; and, predictably, nature won the day.

"To hell with it," he gasped, seizing her shoulders and diving forward into her lips.

The kiss had all the violent clumsiness of a collision, all stiff necks, awkward hand grips and twisted lips, too many years of longing trying to vent themselves in too small a gesture.

"Ach…" Kurt pulled away from her and tried to collect his spinning head. "I'm sorry, that was terrible. Is it too cliché to say that I am usually much better at this?"

Storm's eyes cleared along with at least a sliver of Kurt's mind as the electricity around them dissipated. "Would you like to try again?" she challenged.

Kurt grinned. "I have always advocated practice."

He moved towards her again and started slowly this time, stroking the side of her cheek with his thumb and threading his two fingers through her long silver hair. Ororo sank her face into his caress, grazing his gloved palm with her lips. Of its own accord, his tail began to wind its way tentatively around the small of her back, its pointed tip grazing her shoulder blades.

"Goddess…" breathed Ororo. "I have dreamed of you doing that for a _very_ long time."

Emboldened, Kurt pressed his body closer. His tail swung around them both, pinning their bodies close as its tip resumed a gentle massage of Ororo's spine. He slid his other hand up into her hair so that he was holding the back of her neck and head with both hands as they brought their lips together a second time. While he was savouring her taste Kurt felt the electrical buzz return, this time localized within Ororo's fingers, which she slid down his ribs and up his back.

"_Oh_…" disengaging from her for even the moment it took to speak was almost painful. "If you're going to do _that_ I need to be wearing fewer clothes."

"That can be accomplished," she smiled. "But first… Would you mind, terribly? My room can be so much more private."

Kurt's lips stayed locked with Ororo's between the two 'bamfs' that brought them to Ororo's room. Kurt wondered for a moment about the windows but he saw Ororo's powers work quickly to fog them over.

Slowly, reluctantly, but for the sake of the greater good, Ororo removed her hands from his back, pulling away just enough to access the front zipper of his uniform. Kurt gasped as she touched the metal zipper with her charged fingers. The charge seemed to build as it travelled down his chest and abdomen to where the zipper ended, just below his belly button. Ororo's hand continued where the zipper ended.

"Goddess…" Kurt agreed breathlessly.

Burning to touch while being touched, Kurt performed a whipping twist with his tail that swung her body around, his fangs pressing the back of her neck where he held her hair to the side as he unzipped her. "Are you sure you want to do this?" he panted against her ear. His own answer was telegraphed by the thunder of his heartbeat through his uniform where his pelvis wedged firmly against the back of her upper thigh.

She slid her body around again to face him, letting her unzipped bustier fall to the floor at their feet. "Are you?"

Kurt groaned in response as they thrust their faces and bodies together again, Ororo doing the work of pulling off his gloves to free his hands and shucking the rest of his upper body out of his uniform. She exhaled vocally as his newly freed hands pushed her naked breasts against his velvet-furred chest. Her own hands were working their way down his body again, enjoying the liquid shifting motion of the firm muscles beneath his impossibly soft fur, finding it impossible to imagine how she'd resisted such touching for so many years. As she worked to liberate his tail she encountered her first real surprise. Kurt's whole body went stiff and then limp; his reaction was so severe Ororo worried she'd done something wrong.

"Kurt…? Are you…?"

"Sorry," he sighed into her hair. "At the right moment that spot can be… very sensitive."

"Then I will be careful," she said, touching gently as she slid the last remnants of clothing from his reanimated body.

"Oh my lady…" the air combusted around them and she found herself in her bed, straddling Kurt's naked body beneath her, his tail making two firm coils around her waist, beatific indigo face smiling up at her. "… you may do anything you wish."

It wasn't long before they were both grateful they'd opted for the added privacy of Ororo's room.


	9. Broken Date

Chapter 9: Broken Date

For the fifteenth time in ten minutes, Rachel's eyes bore into her alarm clock's digital display. Kurt was supposed to pick her up at her quarters at 7. Now it was 7:46.

Those forty-six minutes had been torture for Rachel. Every five minutes she confronted grave, spiralling doubts about her dress (Too revealing? Not revealing enough? What impression do I _want_ to convey, anyway?), her shoes (Can I walk? Will Kurt think I'm a silly child if I get a blister and start limping?), and her hair (What is this length? This colour? Too _brassy_—what was I thinking?). At 7:51 she made the executive decision that she couldn't wait any longer. Throwing a hooded sweater over her dress and changing into a more walkable pair of shoes, she took off in the direction of Kurt's quarters.

When Kurt wasn't in his room, Rachel did a cursory mindsweep to locate him. Like all telepaths, she made a point of restricting unauthorized intrusions into people's minds. But she was—depending on the circumstances—either angry or concerned about Kurt's whereabouts, so she felt justified this once. She located Kurt's thought patterns quickly and close by. When she narrowed in on him, though, an overwhelming flood of adrenaline and emotion immediately told her that she had caught him at a very awkward time.

In just the second it took her to disengage, she inadvertently absorbed a staggering rush of sensation not just from Kurt, but also the mind that was, at that particular moment, at very close proximity to his. For one moment, she was inside two minds and two bodies. She felt a firm, velvet-coated abdomen sliding heavily against her own, her body tensing with exquisite pleasure at the rolling, twisting squeeze of a similarly velvet-coated prehensile tail encircling her upper thigh. Her fur spiked and shivered under the swirling currents of a centralized warm front and the tiny sparks of electricity emanating from delicate fingers that simultaneously soothed and stimulated wherever they stroked her. Her breath sputtered as a warm damp mouth at the junction of her neck and jaw heralded a gentle press of fangs, and in virtually the same moment she cried out inarticulately from somewhere deep within herself as electrified fingers pulled down hard on the base of her tail…

"Oh… _my_."

Rachel staggered against the wall.

"You okay, Rach?"

The friendly, ever-eager voice of Bobby Drake brought her back to herself and the hallway.

"Yes," Rachel pushed herself away from the wall and back onto feet that felt decidedly unsteady, despite her sensible footwear. "I'm fine. Just a telepath thing. Gone now."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine," she assured him. "Really. See you around?"

She continued purposefully down the hallway as a way of disengaging herself from further conversation; her ploy worked, as Bobby continued in the opposite direction.

Rachel walked quickly and briskly straight back to her room and shut the door, immediately leaning back against it to slide her suddenly exhausted body to the floor. She sat that way in a kind of stupor for several minutes, trying to process a response. Should she be angry? Jealous? Embarrassed? Or even, she realized, happy for two good friends for finding such a clearly powerful connection in each other's arms?

_But what about me?_ It was a question that often burned within her, as she watched her one-time father Scott Summers coupled with the woman that was not her mother, as she watched X-Man after X-Man return from seeming death while Jean Grey remained so resolutely deceased. In her fractured memories from her own world, Rachel had grown up knowing Kurt and his wife Amanda as loving uncle and aunt; when she was very small, she'd had a plush version of Kurt that she'd hug during thunderstorms, and when she was a bit older, the real Kurt would tell her bedtime stories about the circus, the exploits but also the legends and, of course, the secrets behind all the most time-honoured tricks. She remembered being lulled to sleep by the sound of his voice, marvelling at the accent that seemed, to her at that time, so exotic, apiece with of the legends that thrilled her. Kitty was probably right—it was wrong for her to pursue a relationship with the Kurt of this world. Yet the idea of being close to him, of holding him and being held by him through the night even as she'd held his surrogate through the happier nights of her childhood, when the Grey-Summers' had been a proper family and before her world become a war-torn apocalypse—the thought still seemed so intoxicating.

"Oh Kurt…" she moaned as the tears began. But even as she cried she knew her tears were not really for Kurt; they were for herself, and this newest reminder of the seeming impossibility of her ever truly belonging in a world that was, literally, not her own.


	10. Aftermath

Chapter 10: Aftermath

Kurt didn't know how long he'd been lying there, naked on his stomach with the reposed head and tousled silver hair of his similarly naked longtime friend and teammate burrowed into the hollow of his back. A certain lethargy in his joints, however, suggested that he might have fallen asleep for some time.

"Mmmmm…" Ororo stirred then, roused by the twitching wakefulness of his tail where it entangled her waist and upper thigh. She stroked and massaged his shoulder blades with her face and hands. "So it wasn't a dream."

"Isn't it?"

Ororo's body followed the prompting of Kurt's tail, giving him enough space to shift onto his back before bringing her body up level with his, pinning him beneath her. Kurt was just leaning up to kiss her when he caught the neon display of Ororo's clock radio out of the corner of his eye.

"Mmph—" he broke away from her mid-kiss as the significance of the time finally registered. "Is that the real time?"

"As your commanding officer, I know we have no missions scheduled. Barring an emergency, where could you possibly need to be that is more important than my bed?"

Considering the issue settled, Ororo bent forward and began kissing him behind his pointed ear.

"I was…" a rush of guilt flooded over him, cooling his desire. "I was supposed to meet Rachel at 7. For dinner."

Ororo pulled away from him. "A date?"

"Ja. I… I couldn't have known that this would… I'm so sorry."

She rolled her body off of his and they lay on their sides, facing each other. They were silent for several long moments.

"Ororo," Kurt said at least, almost hating himself for speaking. "What will happen now?"

"I don't know, Kurt," she admitted. "Nothing has to happen, if that is what you want."

"Maybe it's not just what _will_ happen," Kurt ventured. "But what _should_ happen."

"Could we be together?" she asked, as much to herself as to him.

"I have to admit, I had not really thought that far. I love you, Ororo. I will always love you. That's all I know."

She laid the flat of her hand on his chest, over his heart. "Just stay here for now," she said. "Stay here until the morning."

"I will, but there is something I need to do first."

"Rachel?"

"Nein. I think it's best I leave her alone for the time being. Something else. May I return to you?"

"Yes, but… please be quick."

Kurt rolled out of bed. As he crossed the room to retrieve his clothes, Ororo marvelled at his remarkable body in all its naked splendour. While she had never been attracted to "conventional" men, Kurt really was something else entirely. His body was such an intoxicating mix of opposites. The emphasized masculinity of his lean muscles was juxtaposed the extreme softness of the fur that coated them. Similarly, while his demonic features could be intimidating, other parts of his body were almost laughably revealing—though his eyes were sometimes mysterious, his tail was an open book. In lovemaking, too, he was as thrillingly aggressive as he was almost femininely susceptible to the manipulations of touch, capable of being reduced to putty when she rubbed his fur against the grain in the right place at the right time. Even his hands, which should have been awkward, she found alluring; when a man has hands that are literally unlike any other hands in the entire world, you know exactly where you are at every moment that he's touching you.

"Goddess," she breathed, barely aware she was speaking. "You are so beautiful."

Kurt literally froze mid-action, which happened to be picking his uniform up off the floor with his dextrous toes. He finished the motion awkwardly and then looked indecisive about what should happen next.

"Did I say something wrong?"

"No, I…" he stared helplessly at the bundle of clothes in his hands.

Ororo was almost angry as she sat up naked in the bed. "You can't be _serious_, Kurt. Where was this insecurity two hours ago?"

Kurt sighed. "It's not that. I just…"

He filled the pause into which he'd trailed off by walking back over to the bed. He sat down on the bed's edge in that elegant way he always had, the result of his perpetual need to arrange his tail before landing.

"I'm sorry," he began again, earnestly and wearily. "I'm not… I mean, I'm not a fool. I know that women—some women, anyway—find me attractive, but it's still difficult to… With most people I've still had to fight against the opposite perception, so that it's hard to know sometimes what people mean, and I get… I suppose it just makes me wonder: what can it possibly mean to be beautiful when people seem to have such conflicting views of it?"

He was looking at her as he finished, and Ororo could tell that although his question was largely rhetorical, there was also some part of him pleading for a legitimate answer. She ran her hand over the curve of his shoulder, up the back of his neck.

"Are you ashamed of who you are?"

"You know I'm not. But the fact remains that when I do appear in public as myself, it always causes problems. Though it _has_ changed in recent years. These days, it seems that for every two people that want me dead there will be one woman—or one _person_—handing me a phone number."

"Do you ever call any of those numbers?"

"Of course not. You don't… Are you joking?"

"A little."

"Okay, okay, I know. But it's still strange for me. Growing up I was never tortured by self-hatred but I also could never be blind to the effect my appearance had on most people—women certainly included. But as I have been going out more often without my inducer I've realized that I also tend to get certain reactions from women because of my body that are not… Of course I want a woman to enjoy me that way but not… But not just for…" he trailed off, frustrated and, she thought, a little embarrassed.

"Do you trust me, Kurt?"

"Of course."

"Then you should know that I love your body because it belongs to _you_."

Kurt did not miss the hint of anger that had returned to her voice. He reached for her, his golden eyes pleading an apology as he seized her cheek in his one-of-a-kind hand.

"Oh Ororo, I do, of course I do. I would never be here otherwise. I never meant to suggest… I'm so sorry."

He kissed her, slowly and deeply, tugging lovingly at her bottom lip as he released her.

"I would like to think the things I let you do to this body short hours ago would prove how much I trust you," he joked, trying to soften the mood.

Ororo smiled despite herself, raising a coy eyebrow. "Are you sure that shouldn't be the other way around?"

"I don't know," he grinned, springing up from the bed and finally returning to the business of pulling on his uniform, tail slipping effortlessly into the hole at the seat of his pants. "Maybe we can try it that way when I get back."

He dissolved into pink smoke just in time to avoid the isolated gust of frozen air she hurled in his direction.


	11. Cars and Apologies

Chapter 11: Cars and Apologies

Logan was on his back under the car's front end when Kurt appeared in the garage. Kurt didn't speak, but he knew Logan's enhanced senses would have no trouble registering his presence even if his entrance hadn't been accompanied by the smell of brimstone. He perched himself on a nearby counter and waited for Logan to acknowledge him.

"Make yourself useful, elf, and hand me that wrench."

Without getting up, Kurt collected the wrench in a twist of his tail and dangled it next to Logan's hand where it peeked out from beneath the car.

"That ain't a hand," Logan observed, taking the wrench.

"Sorry."

Logan grunted. He was engaged for several minutes before he finally wheeled himself out.

"You gonna come for a ride with me or what?" Logan asked, rising and wiping his hands and face with a nearby rag and then lowering the jack.

Kurt vaunted effortlessly into the passenger's seat.

"Where are we going?"

"Can't go far. Maybe just the edge of the compound."

"Sounds like a hot date."

"Only the best for you, elf," Logan deadpanned, settling into the driver's seat.

The fall air was crisp but not foreboding, not cold enough to eclipse the joys of riding in a '72 Triumph Spitfire convertible. The stars had come out and the sky was clear and bright with a half moon. Crickets screeched noisily on every side and fireflies blinked lazily against the trees and hedges. Kurt noticed that Logan drove suspiciously slowly; he suspected the car was not as road-worthy as his friend's offer of a test drive suggested.

Logan took them to where the gravel road ended in a turn-around point at the top of the compound's highest peak. From there, one looked out over treetops and a sprinkle of distant farms and country mansions toward New York city, visible as a glowing patch of faded orange far away beyond the invisible horizon.

Logan turned off the engine and hopped out, beer in hand. Climbing gently onto the car's hood, he used a barely protruded claw to snap off the bottle cap. He raised the beer to Kurt.

"You want?"

"Not right now."

Kurt climbed over the windshield to join Logan on the car's hood. They sat that way for a while, contemplating the stars, beer, and crickets.

"How did your interview go?" Kurt finally asked.

Logan shrugged. "Heard she asked _you_ out."

"Why has _everyone_ heard that?"

"Small compound, big mouths."

"So this is Scott's new car? Since when has he been interested in British cars?"

"Since now, I guess. Bit _cute_ for me."

"We shouldn't be sitting on the hood."

"Nope."

"Logan, I…" but Logan was already eyeing him strangely.

Kurt's heart stopped. _He can smell her_, he realized. _He knows_. Kurt wanted to say something, anything, to try and explain, but he could think of nothing meaningful to say about things he couldn't even explain to himself.

"I'm sorry," he said at last, hoping desperately that those tiny words could encompass everything and knowing they couldn't.

"Ain't nothing to be sorry about."

Kurt usually appreciated Logan's uncomplicated succinctness, which he knew was his friend's own way of apologizing. But this time he writhed under Logan's attitude for how it seemed to highlight the inadequacy of his own ridiculous apology. "But Logan, I really…"

Logan laid his hand on Kurt's back and Kurt trailed off, knowing, suddenly, that all words were truly inadequate. Kurt leaned toward Logan so that his head rested against his shoulder, while Logan let his hand slide across Kurt's back until his arm was wrapped around him. Squeezing Kurt's body gently against his own, Logan savoured the familiar, now-mingled smells of his two closest friends. In the same moment, Kurt listened to the strong, steady heartbeat that always pulsed everywhere on Logan's body, feeling all his anxiety melting away in that rhythm and the calming weight of Logan's heavy arm holding him close. They sat that way for several minutes, unmindful of who might see them or what conclusions they might draw. The stars stretched out toward the glowing, distant horizon and New York City, in whose aura they finally dissolved into murkiness.

"I should go," said Kurt finally, pulling away.

Logan didn't ask for an explanation. "You want a ride?"

"Not unless you're headed back anyway. I can just teleport."

"I think I'm going to stay put awhile."

Kurt jumped down and cast a final look out over the landscape. "Danger Room? Tomorrow at 9?"

"See you there."

Kurt turned back toward his friend just as he was about to 'port.

"Logan?"

"What is it, elf?"

"I'm very happy you're back."

"Me, too, elf."

Kurt disappeared in a puff of smoke and Logan opened another beer.


	12. Rachel and Remembrance

Chapter 12: Rachel and Remembrance

Kurt's body recognized even before his mind did that he hadn't ended up where he'd intended to. Instinctively assuming a crouched, battle-ready stance, he surveyed his surroundings. An essential aspect of Kurt's mutant ability to teleport was innate special orientation. As such, having a teleport go astray was nothing short of a terrifying experience; because he accessed his ability with the speed of thought, materializing from a 'port at the wrong place was like suddenly losing control of a primary motor function, as though one's usually reliable legs had suddenly become insensible and useless while performing a mundane action like climbing the stairs. Of course, for Kurt there was the added peril that mistakes could very easily prove deadly; the thought of materializing inside a solid object, or even a person, was a constant, underlying fear, kept at bay only by the rarity of anything going amiss. Only extreme weather conditions and hostile magical or technological manipulation had ever managed to disrupt his 'ports in the past.

A quick visual survey, however, confirmed that he had materialized in the dormitory hallway, in no instantly apparent danger. Relaxing his body, Kurt tried to piece together what might have caused him to end up there. He barely had a moment to consider the issue before his attention was distracted by a muffled crash behind the closed door at his left.

_That's Rachel's room_, Kurt realized instantly. His reluctance to confront her immediately overcome by the fear that his teammate might be in some sort of danger, Kurt wrapped lightly on the door.

"Rachel?"

No response.

"Rachel?" he tried again. "Are you alright?"

He was greeted with another crash followed by a loud "thud."

"_Rachel_?"

When Rachel still didn't respond, Kurt took a deep breath, swallowed it, and teleported inside. The room was a mess. Articles of clothing, books, and personal items were scattered everywhere, and several picture frames were shattered. A kind of prickly energy seemed to permeate the space, a sure sign of telekinesis at work; only Kurt's lightning reflexes saved him from a flying tennis shoe that instead whizzed by him to collide with the wall behind his head. In the midst of the chaos, however, Rachel, seemed unharmed, though obviously highly agitated; wearing nothing but a set of uncharacteristically fancy undergarments—no doubt a remnant, Kurt thought with a pang, of their aborted date—she was curled up on her bed in a twitching foetal position, as though under the influence of a particularly disturbing dream. Kurt approached her cautiously and laid his hand on her shoulder.

"Rachel."

Crouching next to the bed, he massaged her upper arm as he repeated her name, louder this time; while he was anxious for her to awaken, he was wary of how potentially hazardous it might be to startle a telekinetic/telepath in the middle of a nightmare. Gradually, though, his voice and touch seemed to have some effect. The energy in the room began to dissipate as the movement of Rachel's body calmed, her twitches stopping completely by the time she finally opened her eyes.

"Kurt…?"

"Ja," Kurt smiled, genuinely relieved. "Are you alight? You gave me quite a scare."

"What… What are you doing here? What happened?" Rachel rose into a sitting position on the bed, surveying her scattered belongings with confusion and a touch a fear.

"I don't know," Kurt admitted. He was beginning to feel vaguely uncomfortable now that the immediate danger had passed; he really hadn't planned on confronting Rachel that evening, especially in such a state of apparent emotional turmoil. "I heard a commotion inside your room, and when you didn't answer I teleported inside and woke you up. I think you were having some kind of nightmare."

"Yes," Rachel agreed listlessly, her eyes matching her voice as they clouded over into a kind of vacant stare. "A nightmare."

"Do, um… Do you want to talk about it?"

"I know," she said. "I know about you and Ororo."

Kurt didn't bother to ask—nor did he particularly want to know—how Rachel knew. While he regretted nothing about what had happened between himself and Ororo, that fact didn't erase his sense of guilt about how he'd treated Rachel.

"Oh Rachel," he pleaded, reaching for her hand. "I am so, so sorry. I should never have mixed you up in all this… I've been so confused, lately, about just about everything. I never, ever intended to hurt you."

To his surprise, Rachel responded to his apology with little emotion of any kind. "S'okay. It's not your fault."

"Um… It isn't? I mean, I really think at least some of the blame—"

"It's my fault," Rachel intoned in her emotionless voice. "I should never have…"

Her face spasmed, and she covered it with her hands as the tears began.

Once again acting instinctively, Kurt moved to sit next to her on the bed, wrapping her shivering form in a hug. "Shhh…" he soothed. "It's okay, it's okay…"

"Oh fuzzy," she sputtered between sobs. "You don't understand…"

"That I freely admit," said Kurt, smoothing her hair. "I am not so conceited as to believe I'm the cause of all _this_. What is it really? What is going on?"

"I just…" Rachel removed her hands from her face and regarded him earnestly through her tear-filled eyes. "I've told you, right, about how I used to know you growing up? In my world, I mean."

"Briefly," he said. "I remember you said I used to tell you stories—about the circus."

Rachel nodded. "I loved those stories. And I loved you. I mean, not in _that_ way… not in the way we kissed the other day. I was just a kid. But things are so different in this world; you're not my 'uncle Kurt' anymore, you're my teammate, and my mom is…" Kurt squeezed her gently as she shuddered, needing a moment to collect herself before continuing. "Anyway, I don't really know how to explain it. I had never thought about you, not really, in that other way before we kissed. But afterwards, I had this feeling… I mean, things are so different here, but I still have these ties to my remembered past, in Scott, in _you_… I just suddenly had this sense that there might be a way to recapture something of that past, something of that happiness and security, through you, through a physical connection with you. Oh God…" she shook her head and buried her face once again in her hands. "I am so, so stupid."

"No, it's…" but in truth, Kurt wasn't quite sure what to say. He was surprised by how apparently seriously she had taken their dalliance. For him, it had been fun; he didn't neglect the potential consequences after the fact, but he had always had a kind of "come what may" attitude where sex and relationships were concerned, partly due to the complications of his body but also because of the romantic disposition imprinted on him so indelibly by the adventure films of his youth. He never went out of his way to pursue casual sex, but he was also not above capping a dramatic rescue with a passionate kiss or, on occasion, something more. Indeed, his inability to fully curb the sexual desire that was so inseparable from his romantic disposition had been a major factor in his rejection of the priesthood. A thirst for adventure was at the core of his nature, and Kurt followed a long line of romantics in regarding love as perhaps the greatest adventure of all.

"It's okay," he tried again. "We are all, all of us, looking for somewhere to belong, someone to belong to."

"No, no, no," she moaned. "You don't understand. It's worse than that."

"Worse? I _don't_ understand. Nothing you're told me is—"

"I had a toy," Rachel blurted out, removing her hands from her tear-soaked face but keeping her gaze slightly averted. "I toy version of you. I don't know if you gave it to me, or my parents, or… Anyway, I'm sure they all thought it was really cute, God knows. But I… I would hold that toy while you told me those stories, and I remember… I remember holding it… holding it and feeling safe as long as it was there. And it was soft, like you… velvet, like your fur. And I think, subconsciously, I thought about that after we kissed, that part of the physical attraction was that idea of security that I associated with… I… oh…" Her sobs started again in earnest, consuming her voice.

A chill crept up Kurt's spine as his mind unwillingly digested what Rachel had said, her words uncomfortably illuminating the primal fears underlying his recently resurrected premonition about being the X-Men's mascot. He knew some people, including friends of his, took quite a literal approach to the "problem" of his physical characteristics by thinking about his mind and body as separate entities; they felt they needed to "look past" his demonic or bestial appearance in order to appreciate his human soul. Yet, as is ultimately true for everyone, Kurt's mind and body were not separate entities. Because he had fur, for instance, Kurt enjoyed, even craved, being petted and stroked, and his tail, as Storm and several other paramours had discovered, could be an erogenous zone in its own right.

Kurt didn't hate or resent his body—that wasn't the problem. The real root of his psychological dilemma was that the very physical characteristics that frequently threatened to unman or even dehumanize him were not something he would part with for anything in the world. Sometimes he wondered: Did the fact that he liked his strange, bestial, demonic body, that he coveted not only the athleticism but also the animalistic pleasures it afforded, mean that he cultivated his own dehumanization? Did liking his fur because of how nice it felt to be petted actually make him more animal than man?

Rachel's face was turned away from him as she cried, softly now, but with no sign of stopping anytime soon. Whether though telepathy—which he had no doubt was responsible for his mistaken teleport—or just through the deep empathy of friendship, Kurt felt suddenly sure that Rachel appreciated the complicated nature of his fears as few did, and that her deep understanding was a crucial aspect of her own current turmoil; she intuited that what she craved as comfort for her pain was something that would hurt him too deeply to give her, hating herself for the things that she wanted. As he held her, Kurt felt Rachel's pain churn within him, colliding and struggling with his own. But the battle proved short lived; he realized quickly that her pain was greater, realer, more immediate, his own distant and semantic. Rachel's desire wasn't pure, but it was also desperate, and ultimately nurtured by what he knew was a genuine, deep down love. So he acted like a leader, and made an executive decision.

Momentarily disengaging himself, Kurt removed his gloves. He then unzipped the top of his uniform and pulled his arms out of the sleeves. Taking Rachel's hand in his, he laid it against his chest. Rachel stared vacantly at her hand where it touched him under his own. Kurt squeezed her hand.

"It's okay," he assured her.

Slowly, tentatively, Rachel started to run her hands over his chest and abdomen, carefully following the grain of his fur around the curves of his muscles. Her touch wasn't erotic; instead, she was almost like a child trying to convince herself of the reality of the body before her. After a few moments, she slid her hands around his sides and rested her face against his chest, closing her eyes. Kurt felt tears dampen his fur, but just a few, more like an afterthought. Slowly, he eased their bodies into a reclining position and then, shifting slightly, he allowed Rachel to spoon him, curling his tail around his own leg and out of the way of any potential misunderstandings. Burying her face in his shoulder blades, she continued to softly, slowly run her fingers through his fur. After a few minutes, she began to relax against him as Kurt, too, was soothed by her touch, guiltless, happy victim of his animalistic physiology.

Exhausted as she was, Rachel soon fell into a deathlike slumber. Kurt, though, lay awake, thinking and remembering. He remembered his first awkward kiss with Amanda, what seemed like an eternity ago, how she'd first laughed at him and then empathized with him due to his poor technique, the result of what turned out to be a foolish concern about accidentally hurting her with his fangs. And he remembered, too, the afternoon at the lake when they'd first made love, with each other or anyone else.

Well aware of his dislike of getting wet in cold water when he didn't have to, Amanda had of course pushed him in. It was getting dry again, though, that stuck in his memory. He'd been drying his too-long hair with a towel, naked except for his underwear and trying to ignore the cold, sodden, feeling of his fur when she'd come up behind him, pulled the towel from his head, and started to use it to rub his wet body. Her own body was still wet but her hands had felt so warm, as had her breath on his neck and her naked thigh where it brushed against his tail…

He'd been in heaven for a full minute before he realized what was happening. He seized and stilled her hands, turning to step out of her embrace.

"Stop."

"It doesn't feel nice? I thought with your fur—"

"That's _not_ the problem."

She closed the distance between them, smiling calmly, knowingly, as her hips fit themselves against his and his tail began to curl instinctively around her, being wet no longer seeming to matter.

"Then I don't see that we _have_ a problem. Do you?"

Back in the present, and not for the first time, Kurt knew he missed Amanda, not just as a lover but as a sister. The problem, of course, was that the former category had inevitably and irrevocably complicated the second. Quite simply, Kurt and Amanda were good at having sex with each other, theirs being the kind of physical relationship that only grows and gets better over time. Kurt often felt that Amanda knew his body better than he did himself—but then, she was his older sister. Even with the not infrequent emotional tension of their long years of on-again-off-again dalliances, their physical kismet was always reliable; on more than one occasion, it had been the cause of abortive attempts to formally reunite. During his last visit Amanda had point blank asked him why he didn't come to see her more often. He'd dodged the question but they both knew: the intensity of their physical connection made it impossible to ever go back to being just brother and sister.

Which of course went a long way toward explaining Kurt's long years of hesitation approaching Ororo. For now, though, it felt good, like another cherished level of an already unbreakable bond. He only prayed she could forgive him for not rejoining her as quickly as he'd promised, fully intending to return as soon he was sure Rachel was okay. After all, there was still plenty of time before morning…

But as the minutes ticked away, it became more and more difficult to think of a viable way of extracting himself from Rachel's embrace. She was sleeping soundly, but her arm and one of her legs were still wrapped firmly around his body. Kurt was afraid that any attempt to disengage himself might awaken her, and she was so clearly, critically in need of rest. As he pondered his situation, Kurt grew increasingly drowsy, a series of half-awake dreams that the body next to his was Ororo's distantly alerting his cloudy mind that he was about to fall asleep. Yet his very last thought before succumbing to his own exhaustion was not of Ororo but Logan. Had he been even slightly more alert, Kurt might have wondered at his thoughts taking such a turn, but in his consuming drowsiness he merely accepted it.

Kurt's sleep-clouded mind drifted back to a specific memory his conscious mind barely remembered. It was during the time of his psychological manipulation by a religious cult, back when he was working toward becoming a priest. He'd been having such terrible dreams to the point where there had come a night when he knew he couldn't sleep alone. So he went to Logan's place. When he'd woken up on Logan's couch from his feverish nightmare and knew he was going to throw up, he hadn't even been able to focus his mind enough to teleport to the bathroom. But Logan had been there and had known what to do, helping him up and even holding his hair while he emptied the runny liquid contents of his empty stomach into the toilet bowl. The memory was something of a blur but he knew Logan had helped him out of his uniform and into something else, something soft—he remembered trying to laugh as Logan used his claws to tear a hole for his tail in a pair of sweatpants. But mostly he remembered Logan holding him, sitting on the floor of the bathroom, Logan's back against the tub while Kurt was held fast between the cage of Logan's arms and legs, shivering and slipping in and out of consciousness. Even subconsciously, Kurt didn't remember most of the details, couldn't piece the whole night together. Yet one specific memory pierced the haze more surely than any other: the warm, comforting sensation of Logan's nostrils flaring, breathing, against his neck, smelling deeply into his fur as his stubbly face burrowed into the space behind Kurt's ear.

Though he would not consciously remember thinking it by the time he awoke in the morning, in that moment Kurt knew that as good as it felt to be in Ororo's arms, for better or worse, he was safest and warmest in Logan's.


	13. Missed Opportunities

Chapter 13: Missed Opportunities

Ororo's first thought upon being woken up at 3:30 am by the sound the XSE emergency alarm was the sickening realization that Kurt had not returned. At first she was worried that some disaster had befallen him, that maybe the alarm explained his absence. But when the team assembled at the Blackbird ten minutes later, Kurt was there along with everyone else, seemingly unharmed. There was no time to talk, not even any feasible way for them to get close to each other in the bustling action of planning and departure. Only for an instant did Ororo manage to catch a glimpse of pleading apology in Kurt's liquid golden eyes. But a confluence of unforeseeable crises meant that she never heard the substance of his apology, that day or any other.

Because two weeks later, Ororo married King T'Challa of Wakanda, the Black Panther. And three months after that, Kurt was dead.


	14. Epilogue: Interviews with Absent Friends

Chapter 14: Epilogue: Interviews with Absent Friends

Logan's blood was ready to boil at he threw open the door to Kurt's room; he'd smelt and heard several bodies inside, where they weren't supposed to be. No one was supposed to be in there—not now that the man who usually slept in that room was dead.

"What the hell are you doing?" Logan demanded, claws snapping into readiness.

A small group of young students and recent refugees were like deer in the headlights, staring back at him with a mix of shock, confusion, and imminent certainty of death. They were in the process of lighting a collection of candles at the foot of the bed, many of them also carrying small bunches of flowers, photos, notes, and cards. Logan felt almost nauseous as he sheathed his claws.

"I'm sorry, I thought…"

But the damage was done. Most of the kids dropped their offerings and made a quick exit, while the few who Logan had met previously attempted to sputter apologies of their own before they similarly departed.

Once everyone had left, Logan picked up the 6-pack he'd dropped before entering and walked heavily over to the small, half-completed memorial and lowered his body to the floor. He glanced at several of the written offerings. One read, "Mr. Wagner: your example helped me believe my powers could be a blessing." Another: "Nightcrawler—your faith preserves us." Most of them, though, simply said "Thank You," less for some direct piece of help or advice than as a general, though deeply felt sentiment: the goodbyes of fans to a legend.

Gulping down the first of what he knew would be many more beers than he had with him, Logan tried to decide what he felt, how he should feel. He knew he felt sad and angry, but there were other, less tangible, less familiar emotions lurking at the edge of his consciousness: fear, dread, helplessness. He wished he could cry but decided that he wasn't in the mood. His emotions were too confused or, perhaps, too powerful to be adequately expressed in any physical manifestation of grief. He wanted to pop his claws and cut deeper than his flesh, tearing Kurt fully resurrected out of his own soul. And then what? Lock him away, chain him to the bed, anything to keep him safe. He'd have his own muscles coated in adamantium is he needed to. Anything, anything, to keep Kurt safe now that he knew the real pain of losing him.

"Am I interrupting?" Ororo didn't wait for a response as she entered the room.

"Leave me alone."

"I can't do that."

She walked slowly and deliberately through the small space, touching walls and objects like they were ghostly appendages of an absent body.

"What are you doing, Logan."

"I…" Logan stared thoughtfully at his beer. "I know this is what people always say, and I've told so many people they're being crazy and need to get over it but—I just can't believe he's gone. We've cheated death so many times, 'Ro."

Ororo stopped in front of Kurt's dresser as she examined a framed photograph of Scott, Jean, Peter, Kurt, herself, and Logan, taken she knew not where—maybe Japan?—during their first years as X-Men. Logan watched her turn the picture over and over in her hands.

"Did you know that Kurt and I slept together?"

Logan's first instinct was to lie, but he had no appetite for deceptions that suddenly seemed so meaningless. "Yeah."

"Were you ever jealous?"

"No," Logan regarded her earnestly, pleadingly, but she was still examining the photograph. "I loved him, 'Ro."

"As did I, my friend."

Logan dropped his eyes to his beer. "I keep saying that he was the only one that treated me like I wasn't some kind of animal, but he died… he died knowing that's exactly what I am."

"Was he wrong?"

"No."

"I spoke with Scott about X-Force," she said, stroking the picture with her hands as though trying to coax Kurt out of it. "He said he ordered you to do it. He took full responsibility. I laughed at the thought of someone _making_ you do something, even Scott."

She stopped stroking the picture and clutched it to her breast. "Goddess help me. I feel old, Logan. Every time I feel like I've cried all the tears I have to cry… There he is again."

She turned to face him. "I am taking this picture. You may try and kill me if you like. Isn't that what you do now?"

"'Ro…"

"Tell me I'm wrong, Logan."

"You're not wrong. But you weren't there, were you? You want to judge us from up on your throne? Go ahead. But X-Force was out there trying to prevent all this. Trying to prevent genocide any way we could. If that makes us the bad guys I'll take the heat for that. And you know what? If I had to do it all over again, I'd kill more of them. Because maybe if I'd killed more of them, Kurt would still be alive."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Ororo, picking up a beer, whose cap he dutifully popped, as she joined him, cross-legged, on the floor. "Because that means this could very well be the last drink we will ever share together."

"To Kurt."

Logan raised his bottle and Ororo dutifully tapped her own against it. They sat that way in silence for several long minutes, drinking, not quite uncomfortable under the lingering influence of Kurt's calming spirit.

"Logan? Ororo?"

It was Rachel at the door. They both looked up.

"What is it, Rachel?" asked Ororo.

"I, um… I don't know if this is the best time," she began, tiptoeing nervously into the room. "But I'm, or I was, taking care of Kitty's stuff while… But then… Well, you know. And now… Anyway, I have something that I thought you—Logan—might want to have."

"What is it Rach?"

"It's, um, it's the DVDs of those media interviews you guys—Logan and Kurt—did a few months ago, before we moved to San Francisco."

"But I thought those recordings had been lost," said Storm.

"They, well… they weren't so much lost as…" Rachel grimaced, angry at her seeming childishness in the midst of such a grave setting. "Kitty and I stole them. We had dared Kurt and Logan to be totally honest with the interviewers, and we thought, after the fact, that they might not want it winding up in the wrong hands. We meant to destroy them, but then…"

"I'll take care of it," said Logan.

Rachel came forward and handed the discs off to Logan. At the same moment, Logan watched Rachel and Ororo exchange a glance that smacked of telepathy.

"I think I will leave you to it," said Ororo, eyes still locked on Rachel's. "Rachel?"

Rachel nodded wordlessly, and the two left together.

Logan waited until they'd gone. Then he got up, locked the door, popped the DVD labelled "Wolverine" into Kurt's DVD player and fired up the TV.

The recordings that Kitty and Rachel had liberated only included one camera and microphone, so that Melody Mitchell was absent and inaudible. As a result, what survived played out like a monologue. Each interview was long, approximately thirty minutes. But Logan only heard the important parts.

**Wolverine's Interview:**

Nightcrawler? I guess you could say he's… Well, he's my best friend. But no, actually it's not so simple because people have different ideas what that means. What I mean is… I mean, I've been in love plenty of times with women, in love where you feel that… _connection_… that's—

Now I am getting too complicated. Too _sentimental_. I guess what it really is when you feel that way about someone is that you want to protect them. You take on a duty to protect them, to keep them safe from whoever, whatever might try to destroy them. Now before you jump all over me—this feeling doesn't have to be _romantic_, although I have felt that way about women I've been romantically involved with. Nightcrawler—_Kurt_—he's just… He's my best friend. And I would die to keep him safe.

But I get how that might seem strange. People, even people who know us both pretty well, have wondered what we have in common. The truth is: not a heck of a lot. He's my opposite in plenty of ways: devoutly religious, pacifist at heart—a bit of a martyr, to tell you the truth. I mean, I've taken plenty—plenty—of lumps for teammates, innocent bystanders, hell, even for people I didn't like and didn't deserve my damn help. But Kurt'll throw himself into a scrap, put his life on the line, for something semantic, like, because they don't let kids with red hair use the skating rink between 5 and 6 pm or something. Dumb example, but you get the idea. He's a bleeding heart that way. I'd blame it on his religion but I don't really like religion while I like Kurt a lot. If more religious people were more like Kurt maybe religion wouldn't be so bad.

I guess, to be honest, that we're so different does have a lot to do with it, with me wanting to protect him. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of stuff that bugs the hell out of me about him, and his religion is pretty near the top of the list. I mean, I don't have a problem with religion necessarily—I haven't seen a lot of great examples of it being a real good thing for most people who take it too seriously, but that doesn't mean I'm necessarily against the idea of someone believing in God. The way I see it is, believing in some ultimate intelligence behind everything is maybe less crazy than a lot of the things we've seen as X-Men, so I can't really argue with the idea. But I know Kurt well enough, have watched him and lived side by side with him enough years, to know that for all of his smiles and jokes he's still not totally comfortable in his own skin, still lets other people's perceptions, the wrong kind of people's perceptions, affect how he sees himself.

I mean, all you have to do is watch him keep his tail in check when he's out in public. If it's just us—just X-Men, I mean—that thing's all over the place, like a mood ring or a punctuation mark on a sentence. Like how everybody talks with their body anyway but Kurt's got a different body so, you know. But if he's in public, or even around people he's just met—and I don't even know if this is conscious, I'm still unclear how much direct control he has over the thing—it's all down and still, or even wrapped around his leg, like he's trying not to draw attention to it, like he knows, or is afraid, that people are staring. And he might be right but that's not the point. The point is that when he acts like that it shows in some way, deep down, he's ashamed in front of these people, these people who if they pass judgement on him aren't even fit to be in the same room with him, aren't even fit to lick his boots.

Now I know what you're gonna say. "But isn't that just being considerate? Not to want to upset people?" But you need to really think about what you're saying there. No one asks non-mutants to act less like non-mutants, so why should a mutant have to act less like a mutant? Having a tail, having blue fur and two fingers and pointy ears—that's who Kurt _is_, and to ask him to be someone else so's not to upset people ain't right. It's not the same as being polite, as having the decency not to swear in front of somebody's grandmother or something. It'd be more like asking that kid with red hair to wear a blonde wig every time she wants to go to that skating rink between 5 and 6 pm. It ain't right. And the thing that kills me is that he'll still even come for a drink with me at a bar using his image inducer to look like someone else no matter how many times I've told him: I'm not having a drink with my friend until he looks like my friend.

To be fair, I can't be one hundred percent sure where his religion fits into all that. But I know for sure Catholicism wasn't something he picked up from his sometimes-evil sorceress foster mother. I know it's something he picked up on his own as a teenager. That's a _bad sign_ in my books. It just smacks of being an excuse to me—like, he needs to believe in intelligent design or whatever to explain himself to himself. But what I'd like better is if he didn't feel like he needed to explain to himself at all. I want him to be happy just being, not looking for some convoluted reason behind it. And the fact that he looks for these reasons suggests to me he's ashamed, and I resent his religion for maybe keeping him from facing that truth a little bit, the truth that he's ashamed deep down of being a mutant.

But the thing about Kurt is that he's naïve as hell in some of the stuff he does and thinks, and Kurt, the things he's gone through in life, he's got no good reason to be naïve. Sure, we X-Men have all gone through some bad stuff as mutants. For me it's stuff I struggle every day to face, the stuff that's been done to me 'cause I'm a mutant. But then again, I ain't never been hunted down with torches and pitchforks like I was Frankenstein's monster, and as messed up as my childhood (what I can remember of it) was, my mother didn't toss me over a waterfall to save herself (that was many years _after_ my fling with her, by the way). But I guess that's what makes me wonder about him. If he can go through all that and still be the way he is… Maybe he really does know something I don't. So maybe it's actually a choice with him, a choice to believe in something positive for us all.

I've gone through all this myself before but it hits me again every time, the thing that makes us alike. Maybe Kurt _is_ dumb 'cause he's willing to sacrifice himself for ideals, for this belief in a positive future. But if he is I'm just as dumb, because I'd give my life for Kurt. In my own way, then, I'd die for those ideals of his, too.

**Nightcrawler's Interview:**

That's something that people have asked me, or _wanted_ to ask me, many times. If I could, would I want to be 'normal'? Would I want to trade blue fur and glowing yellow eyes for a Caucasian complexion and brown irises, two fingers for five? In fact I like being the way I am. It's sort of an impossible question, really. I have always been this way so to actually want to be something different is really asking if I'd like to be some_one_ different. And I don't want that. While it's a pain going through life needing discreet alterations to all your pants, to ask me if I'd be happier without my tail is _not_ like asking a person whether they would be happier with a nose job. It would be more like asking a musician whether they would be happier without their hearing—you could learn to live without it but you probably wouldn't want to. For all the problems they have caused me, my unique physical characteristics are essential to my being. They make me who I am.

But I'm making it sound too easy. In truth, it's been difficult for me many times in my life to reconcile the fact of my extreme uniqueness. In that, God has helped me, whatever my teammate Wolverine thinks to the contrary. He may think I don't understand his perspective but I do—he thinks my belief in God proves that I'm ashamed of who I am. But that is not the basis of my faith. What I find in God is the promise that all people may find acceptance in life, that all bodies are holy because we are all God's children. In this, my faith helps fortify me against the disapproving stares, verbal insults, and even the physical attacks my appearance has provoked in people. My faith helps to remind me not to see myself through the eyes of my detractors, but through the eyes of God as something unique and special, as we are all unique and special.

Wolverine? He's… At times, I suppose you could say we've been… that we are…

_Truthfully_, he's my best friend. At times, though, there has been conflict between us. Wolverine—_Logan_—comes from a… from a _military_ background that frequently puts him at odds with my own beliefs. Yet…

When I first joined the X-Men, he was the only one who never reacted adversely to my appearance, who always accepted me without question. And I think that's very… That says a lot about a person. That sounds silly but it does—I know this, I've experienced it many times, and found it to be true. So I knew because of how he accepted me so easily that there were things beneath his sometimes… _abrasive_ exterior that he wouldn't necessarily want to admit, even though they are things he should be proud of. Like his facility for great compassion, empathy, understanding. He's always telling me I shouldn't have to hide, but I find it ironic that he so frequently fails to, as it were, 'practice what he preaches.'

Maybe I should…

You see, I never knew my father. I recently found out some information about it that—well anyway, perhaps the less said about that the better. Suffice to say that when I was a child growing up I had no father, or father figure, that I looked up to. I'm not so chauvinistic as to think that matters—I had a loving foster mother, brother, and sister, which is really more than any child abandoned on a roadside can usually hope for. But still, I have found myself missing that connection at times that I've seen others enjoy, that connection between man and boy, where the boy learns as much from the man as the man learns from the boy.

Logan is not my father, or some kind of substitute father figure. Even if I weren't too old to harbour such childish needs and illusions he would not fill that role. But there is something… Logan is closer than a brother to me, maybe even closer than a father would be, I don't know. What I do know is that since I joined the X-Men, there have been times when I questioned my faith in God, usually because bad things happened to me or to my friends that made me question God's faith in _me_. But Logan has never lost faith in me. He has always supported me, even when I've done things that, in retrospect, were probably the wrong thing to do. That's how I knew—how I _know_—deep down, and with certainty, that he was—_is_—an idealist, a man of faith, like myself. Only his faith is in himself, and his judgement. And I thank the Lord that he—my friend, my best friend—judges me worthy. While I have sometimes been uncertain of God's protection, I have never been uncertain of Logan's.

At the end of his interview, Kurt's face, in response to another unheard, unseen question, ignited in a stellar exemplar of his famously disarming smile.

"Well," he said. "I'm very flattered but… I, well, at least I… I _think_ I'm seeing someone at the moment. No, no, please… don't be sorry, I'm very… Yes, thank you. It _has_ been a pleasure."

Then he stood up to shake the interviewer's hand so that the last recorded image before the screen went blue was the red "X" logo on the chest of his uniform.

As he stared at the blue screen, Logan's heart twisted. His mind was full of Kurt's smile, his voice… If he just concentrated, if he could just remember his _smell_…

"He was a remarkable man."

Logan started at a familiar voice that he had not heard in a long time. How long had she been there, and how had he not noticed her?

"_Amanda_? What the hell are you doing here? How did you get in?"

Amanda Sefton's long blonde hair spilled down the front of her royal blue robe from beneath an expansive hood that hid her eyes in shadow.

"Please, Logan. I _am_ a sorceress."

"Are you really here?"

"Yes… And no. But this is not a dream, much as I wish it were. My mother heard about what happened and… I had to know, to see for myself. But it's true, isn't it? He really is gone."

"I'm so sorry, 'Manda. I should have been there, I should have—"

"Don't, Logan, I know. And I can't stay. I didn't even want to make my presence known except that I know you and Kurt were…" as she trailed off she actually seemed to be fading, dissipating into the air around them.

"'Manda…" Logan struggled to find some kind of meaningful condolence to offer her. He failed. Amanda was more successful.

"Ororo might not forgive you," she said. "But Kurt would have."

And then she was gone, Logan unable to really trust whether she'd ever been there at all. Yet he was sure that her words, real or imagined, were true: Kurt would have forgiven him. And Logan hated himself for it.

Dropping his head into his hands, Logan was still unable to cry. He couldn't. Because his heart was missing.

END


End file.
